Talk to Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Purple Cow is Seth Godin's argument that the era of traditional marketing — mass advertising, interruption, and promotion — is effectively over, and that the only reliable route to growth is making something so remarkable that people talk about it without being paid to. The title comes from a thought experiment: driving through the countryside, you'd be amazed by a purple cow. But even an extraordinary cow becomes invisible once you've seen enough of them. Remarkable products earn attention once; ordinary products never earn it at all.
Godin's diagnosis is that the old model — make an average product, buy advertising, reach enough people, profit — is broken because people have learned to ignore advertising they didn't ask for, and because every mass channel has become saturated. The solution is not better advertising. The solution is making the product, service, or experience itself worth talking about. Remarkable is not a marketing strategy layered on top of a mediocre product — it is the product.
What it gets right
- 1.
The old marketing model — average product plus mass advertising — is broken because people have learned to ignore advertising they didn't ask for.
- 2.
Remarkable is the only reliable strategy. Products that are worth talking about earn word of mouth; products designed to be safe earn silence.
- 3.
The purple cow metaphor: ordinary is invisible, even if extraordinary was once astonishing. The only way to cut through noise is to design something genuinely unexpected.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Seth Godin is an American entrepreneur, author, and one of the most widely read marketing writers in the world. He is the founder of Squidoo and Yoyodyne, and a former vice president at Yahoo. He has written more than twenty books, including Permission Marketing, Linchpin, The Dip, and Tribes. His blog, seths.blog, has run daily since the early 2000s. Purple Cow, published in 2003, crystallized his argument about remarkable products and became one of his most cited works. He lives in New York.
