John Steinbeck's 'Purple Cow'

Production, Pricing, Promotion, Positioning, Publicity, Packaging, Pass-along and Permission.

Marketing isn’t guaranteed to work, but the way things used to be, if you got all your Ps right, you were more likely than not to succeed.

Something disturbing has happened, though. The Ps just aren’t enough. This is a book about a new P, a P that is suddenly exceptionally important.

The new P is “Purple Cow.”

The essence of the Purple Cow is that it must be remarkable. In fact, if “remarkable” started with a P, I could probably dispense with the cow subterfuge, but what can you do?

This book is about the why, the what, and the how of remarkable.

Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. It’s a Purple

The new rule is:

Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.

The marketer of yesterday valued the volume of people she could reach. The center of the black curve above was the goal. Mass marketing traditionally targets the early and late majority because this is the largest group. But in many markets, the value of a group isn’t related to its size – a group’s value is related to its influence. In this market, for example, the early adopters heavily influence the rest of the curve, so persuading them is worth far more than wasting ad dollars trying to persuade anyone else.

The reason it’s so hard to follow the leader is this: The leader is the leader because he did something remarkable. And that remarkable thing is now taken – it’s no longer remarkable when you do it.

If a product’s future is unlikely to be remarkable – if you can’t imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product – it’s time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.

No one is going to eagerly adapt to your product. The vast majority of consumers are happy. Stuck. Sold on

Find the group that’s most profitable. Find the group that’s most likely to sneeze. Figure out how to develop/adver- tise/reward either group. Ignore the rest. Your ads (and your products!) shouldn’t cater to the masses. Your ads (and products) should cater to the customers you’d choose if you could choose your customers.

The Cow is so rare because people are afraid.

If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise – ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.

You don’t need passion to create a Purple Cow. Nor do you need an awful lot of creativity. What you need is the insight to realize that you have no other choice but to grow your business or launch your product with Purple Cow thinking. Nothing else is going to work.

You don’t need a book about creativity or brainstorming or team building. You’ve already got a hundred (or a thousand) ideas your group doesn’t have the guts to launch. You don’t need more time or even more money. You just need the realization that a brand new business paradigm is now in