Moo! Think Purple Cow!
Be different, remarkable, extraordinary, exciting...challenging.
Purple Cow is the name of a remarkable little book about advertising and marketing by former President of Direct Marketing for Yahoo, Seth Godin.
For decades, mass marketing through television worked wonders and it sold billions of dollars worth of products. It even worked for the internet...for awhile.
Consider email and banner ads - When the internet was new to all of us, we loved getting email, and banner ads were cool.
We liked all the special and free offers in our inboxes and all the cool graphics on banner ads were very interesting...then they became boring and now they're down right annoying. When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad?
In fact there's now evidence that people purposely ignore banner ads, they intentionally look away when a banner ad is on a web page.
Then we come to the most annoying type of advertising, pop-ups. Don't you just hate those things. How many times have you hit a web site where you just get inundated with pop-ups.
All this kind of advertising on the internet and TV is what Seth Godin, the author of Purple Cow, would call interruption marketing, and that just doesn't work anymore.
The TV industrial complex, as Seth puts it, is dead. We can no longer just throw money at our target market and hope they will respond. The main reason for that is that we have nearly everything we need.
What do you mean by that?
Let me give you a good example. When aspirin first showed up on the market it was a great product. Aspirin was something that just about everyone wanted and needed and it provided a wonderful benefit.
Go into your local drugstore now and walk down the pain reliever aisle. If you were to try introducing a new pain reliever today, your product would be invisible... nobody would care. Who needs another pain reliever.
So, what do we do? How do we market?
We can start by stop being boring. Boring will always lead to failure. It's more risky to be boring than it is to be risky.
What?...that doesn't make sense.
Well, yes it does. When you are boring, you risk being ignored. When you are risky, at least you will get noticed.
The best way to market today is to be different, be innovative, be remarkable, be a Purple Cow.
A Purple Cow gets noticed!
Also, make sure you're selling what people need, which isn't much these days.
An example...
In 1912 the bread slicing machine was invented...and it was a complete failure. Why? People didn't need a bread slicer...they needed sliced bread. It wasn't till almost twenty years later when Wonder Bread was marketed that sliced bread was a hit. Someone finally got around to marketing the right product.
The bread was the Purple Cow.
The lessons in Seth's book are fascinating and inspiring and will open pathways in your brain to new ways of thinking about your product and your business, regardless of what you do.
Those of us on the internet need to pay special attention to this. The pace of the internet is lightyears faster than the TV industrial complex ever even thought about being. Most marketing on the internet is annoying at best, sickening at worst.
There are very few that are doing the truly innovative on the internet today.
Watch out for most every person that's going to sell you their get rich quick program. The only people that are getting rich quick are the ones that are marketing those scams.
Everybody claims to have the best marketing program or product on the net. Most of it is copycat material making only the scammers rich.
Although Seth's book has nothing to do with the internet specifically there are gems to be learned and applied to any business situation you are involved in, especially doing business on the internet.
Learn how to be truly innovative, risky, different and exciting.
Read Seth's book and learn how to make you and your business a Purple Cow.
