Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable [Paperback]

Let me save you money and time. Read the summary below rather than buying and reading this book:

Marketing should begin with a differentiated product or service that gets attention (like a purple cow does among a field of brown ones). Be sure that those who care deeply about that differentiation learn about your product or service (as Krispy Kreme does by providing free donuts when it opens a new store). Those who care will e-mail and tell everyone they know (the ideavirus concept Mr. Godin has written about before). Keep adding new differentiated enhancements to your product or service (pretty soon you don't find a purple cow so interesting). Start looking for totally new business models that provide a breakthrough like your first purple cow did. Don't waste your time and money on advertising. Alternatively, it's dangerous not to do this because your product or service will be lost among all of the other brown cows (undifferentiated offerings).

I congratulate Mr. Godin on his marketing skill. Turning these few old saws with a few new examples into a best seller is outstanding marketing. Otherwise, I would grade this book as a one star effort. It will only be of value to those who have never read anything about the power of business model innovation. To learn how to do successful business model innovation, you will have to look elsewhere. I was particularly disappointed that he relied on examples that are so old. Starbucks, HBO and Krispy Kreme, for instance, haven't done a business model innovation in years. Only the JetBlue example is recent. Yet the world is full of new examples he could have talked about.

Actually, the book's key metaphor is flawed. While a purple cow (like the title and cover of this book) will certainly get your attention (and may get you to spend a few dollars to investigate it), is there really anyone out there who wants an actual purple cow because it provides any value other than uniqueness? The example reminds me of the old-time professional wrestler, Gorgeous George, who always wore purple and used that color in everything he owned (including his car and turkeys on his ranch near Yucaipa, California). Yes, the purple attracted your attention . . . but unless you liked his wrestling, that one glance was the end of it. I remember driving to his ranch to see a purple turkey, but never went back. Actually, the charity cows that are painted and decorated by different artists and then auctioned off in different cities would have made a better metaphor for this book.

Like much of what pretends to be new and different in business books today, this book is simply dressed up on modern clothes and new terms. I suggest you read Strategy Maps, the Innovator's Solution and Corporate Creativity if you want to learn how create these changes successfully in a company.

As I finished the book, I began to realize that much of what is wrong with business gurus today is that they love to tell their own ideas . . . but are seldom willing to do the hard work necessary to locate and measure how to do what they espouse. It made me realize that I should always "walk my talk to teaching people how to do what I encourage them to do."

Let me save you money and time. Read the summary below rather than buying and reading this book:

Marketing should begin with a differentiated product or service that gets attention (like a purple cow does among a field of brown ones). Be sure that those who care deeply about that differentiation learn about your product or service (as Krispy Kreme does by providing free donuts when it opens a new store). Those who care will e-mail and tell everyone they know (the ideavirus concept Mr. Godin has written about before). Keep adding new differentiated enhancements to your product or service (pretty soon you don't find a purple cow so interesting). Start looking for totally new business models that provide a breakthrough like your first purple cow did. Don't waste your time and money on advertising. Alternatively, it's dangerous not to do this because your product or service will be lost among all of the other brown cows (undifferentiated offerings).

I congratulate Mr. Godin on his marketing skill. Turning these few old saws with a few new examples into a best seller is outstanding marketing. Otherwise, I would grade this book as a one star effort. It will only be of value to those who have never read anything about the power of business model innovation. To learn how to do successful business model innovation, you will have to look elsewhere. I was particularly disappointed that he relied on examples that are so old. Starbucks, HBO and Krispy Kreme, for instance, haven't done a business model innovation in years. Only the JetBlue example is recent. Yet the world is full of new examples he could have talked about.

Actually, the book's key metaphor is flawed. While a purple cow (like the title and cover of this book) will certainly get your attention (and may get you to spend a few dollars to investigate it), is there really anyone out there who wants an actual purple cow because it provides any value other than uniqueness? The example reminds me of the old-time professional wrestler, Gorgeous George, who always wore purple and used that color in everything he owned (including his car and turkeys on his ranch near Yucaipa, California). Yes, the purple attracted your attention . . . but unless you liked his wrestling, that one glance was the end of it. I remember driving to his ranch to see a purple turkey, but never went back. Actually, the charity cows that are painted and decorated by different artists and then auctioned off in different cities would have made a better metaphor for this book.

Like much of what pretends to be new and different in business books today, this book is simply dressed up on modern clothes and new terms. I suggest you read Strategy Maps, the Innovator's Solution and Corporate Creativity if you want to learn how create these changes successfully in a company.

As I finished the book, I began to realize that much of what is wrong with business gurus today is that they love to tell their own ideas . . . but are seldom willing to do the hard work necessary to locate and measure how to do what they espouse. It made me realize that I should always "walk my talk to teaching people how to do what I encourage them to do."

Anyhow, Godin's big thesis is that, for any new product to be successful, it must be intrinsically interesting, like the purple cow of the title, and cannot rely on subsequent marketing efforts to lend it a certain false notability. Even then, for a product merely to be interesting is not enough on its own: it must gain the attention of a particular group of innovators - those who are not merely open to adopting new ideas and products but those who also go on actively to evangelise them among the rest of the population, thereby seeding them among the early majority. Because of this adoption path, Godin avers, mass advertising can actually be counterproductive, as it effectively does the word-of-mouth brigade out of a job. And the innovators in any market, who like to discover products for themselves, are instantly turned off anything that is touted indiscriminately in the mass media.

I think he is generally right on most of this. Most of us in our businesses are naturally inquisitive, and it is healthy for us to be reminded of how tiny the appetite is for innovation among most consumers in most categories. Generally (and Godin is lucky being an American - try fostering innovation among elderly Frenchmen, say) people are not looking for new ways of doing things, not least because the mass market is already rather well catered for by the many established mass market brands. People do not wake every day looking for another formal airline, another refreshing soft drink, yet another breakfast cereal. This surely explains why so many of the successful "launches" (EasyJet, Red Bull, Fruit Winders, texting are four European examples Godin doesn't mention) were not launched at all in the conventional sense. They were adopted by a niche group of innovators, who eventually expanded their use.

Godin is also right in attacking the "TV-industrial complex" and the way it makes the mass media tail wag the NPD dog. Because it's assumed that mass media will launch Product X, it is duly assumed that Product X must be developed to appeal to the mass market of TV viewers. Because there is no instant appetite for new mass products, one launch after another fails. I believe this.

My chief complaint is as follows. In attacking the TV-industrial complex, I think Godin overlloks the fact that the principal use of mass advertising is not the launching of new brands but the maintenance of old ones. And I think he could pay more heed to the remarkable fact that the innovators of the last century (the Fords, the Kelloggs, the Guinnesses, the Amexes) have retained their positions remarkably well. Surely mass media had rather a lot to do with this?

I also know from experience that mass advertising can be vital in preventing a new innovation being stigmatised as something purely for geeky innovators (a risk that imperilled the speedy uptake of broadband for a time).

Lastly, I wish Godin had read the recent Y&R paper "You're Getting Old" before reading this book. A fusion of his idea, and the Y&R insight (that people's brand preferences become frozen in time once they hit 35) would have produced a still better book.

But never mind. All of you can gain one thing from sending bulk copies of this book to your clients. And that's the understanding that NPD might sometimes be better entrusted to the DM agency, with its understanding of segments, than to the Ad agency, with its obsession with mass.