Title RIG_Purple Cow Text Summary.pdf ✅

KEY QUOTES A ReadinGraphics production • Copyright © 2022 Skool of Happiness Pte Ltd. • All Rights Reserved. PURPLE COW SETH GODIN Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable The Big “So What” Introduction 1 “This book is about the why, the what, and the how of remarkable.” “Marketers for years have talked about the five Ps of marketing...This is a book about a new P, a P that is suddenly exceptionally important.” “Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service.” The world of marketing has changed forever, and traditional forms of marketing no longer work. The best way to launch a new product/service or build a brand successfully is to be remarkable. This book explains why and how to build Purple Cows that people will notice and talk about. In the past, businesses typically used the 5Ps of marketing to guide their marketing strategy and tactics. Depending on the company or individual, the 5Ps could include: product, pricing, promotion, positioning, publicity, packaging, pass-along, and permission. Today’s marketing climate calls for a new P—the “Purple Cow”. • The Purple Cow refers to something remarkable, i.e. something worth noticing and talking about. Imagine you’re a city-dweller driving through the countryside. Initially, you may feel excited to see brown cows grazing in the fields, but you’ll quickly lose interest after a few hours of the same scenery. Then, you notice a purple cow in the field. Suddenly, you’re sitting up, snapping photos and sharing it with everyone—because it’s unique and remarkable. • This book is written in many short, bite-sized chapters, each discussing a concept or insight about marketing. In this summary, we’ve consolidated the ideas into 2 main sections: The New World of Marketing; and Creating your Purple Cows. (i) (ii)
KEY QUOTES A ReadinGraphics production • Copyright © 2022 Skool of Happiness Pte Ltd. • All Rights Reserved. The New World of Marketing 2 “The world has changed. There are far more choices, but there is less and less time to sort them out.” “As consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.” Marketing has changed dramatically in the past decades: • Before the age of TV and advertising, people relied primarily on word of mouth to discover great products/services, such as the market stalls with the freshest produce. • During the advertising era, companies with big budgets could spend money on mass media ads (e.g. TV, newspapers, magazine) to reach masses of people, sell more products, • We’re now in the post-advertising era, where the market is so saturated with ads that consumers have become indifferent to them. Successful marketing now hinges on the ability to solve consumers’ problems and get word-of-mouth referrals. To do so, marketers must first grab consumers’ attention and have a solution that works. Today’s consumers are still looking for great solutions to their problems. The key marketing challenge is this: there are now more and more choices, and people have less and less time. So, they simply ignore the unwanted messages. Even satisfied customers are less likely to share about a product unless it’s truly exceptional. • You can only sell a product/service to someone who has the money, time, or desire to buy it. The person must: Be able to afford your product; Have the time to listen to your pitch/message; and Want the product after hearing the pitch. • For example, if you were the first to invent aspirin, it would’ve been much easier to get people’s attention. Today, to sell a new brand of aspirin, you must: then invest the profits in more advertising to grow their market share. Mass-market ads were effective since there were relatively fewer advertisers and choices for consumers. (i) (ii) (iii)
KEY QUOTES A ReadinGraphics production • Copyright © 2022 Skool of Happiness Pte Ltd. • All Rights Reserved. Why You Need Purple Cows 3 Find a way to reach the people who need pain relief; Find those who’re willing to consider a new brand; and Convince them to choose your brand over your competitors (including established brands that’ve had years to hone their products and ads). • Today, results from mass-media advertising are dismal despite the high costs. If you reach 1 mil people but only 0.001% make a purchase, that translates to just 10 customers. Godin did an experiment with people reading the Wall Street Journal at a hotel lobby. He asked if they could name 2 companies that had run a full-page ad, if they could recognize the company (after he hid the logo on the ad), or if they had ever enquired about a product/ service after seeing the ads. The answer was “no” to all 3 questions. Famous marketer Sergio Zyman admitted that 2 of Coke’s most famous commercials—“I’d like to teach the world to sing” and “Mean Joe Greene”—didn’t generate any additional revenue. (ii) (iii) (i) (ii) According to Godin, 80% of the new entrants to Interbrand’s top 100 brand list succeeded due to word of mouth, not extensive advertising. The most wildly-successful solutions tend to be outliers, i.e. they’re unusually fast or slow, big or small, luxurious or affordable. • Each of these companies stood out because they didn’t play by the rules—and neither should you: JetBlue Airways went with a low-cost structure, underused airports, and non-union staff, at a time when air travel was dominated by full-service airlines with unionized staff. Starbucks invented the coffee bar concept, at a time when canned supermarket coffee was the norm. Vanguard created low-cost index funds that full-service brokers simply couldn’t compete with. (i) (ii) (iii) “Stop advertising and start innovating.” “Services that are worth talking about get talked about.” (i)
KEY QUOTES A ReadinGraphics production • Copyright © 2022 Skool of Happiness Pte Ltd. • All Rights Reserved. 4 “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 you try to copy the market leader, you’ll always lag behind. More importantly, you’ll never be remarkable since your idea/approach won’t be unique. • Offering the lowest price is also not a good strategy since your rivals can always undercut you. Being a Purple Cow means offering drastically lower prices and higher value by fundamentally changing how a product is designed, produced or delivered—like what IKEA did with home furnishing. In “Crossing the Chasm”, Geoff Moore presents the adoption curve which explains how new technology moves through the market. Although the book was written for high-tech solutions, the insights apply to virtually any product/service in any market. • Innovators are the first to try new products, not because they need the products but because they simply love new solutions. • After them comes the early adopters who actually benefit from the products. They’re actively looking for good solutions to their problems, and will pay for such products or services. • The early and late majority represent the bulk of the market. However, they’re happy with existing solutions and will ignore your marketing messages. The only way to get their attention is by getting the early adopters to embrace your solution and spread the word. • The laggards start using the products when people are already moving on to newer solutions, e.g. they start using CDs when people are ready to move on to mp3s. In short, a new product/service cannot reach the mass market without first going through the innovators and early adopters. If you target the mass market directly, you’ll fail because: Diagram adapted from Crossing the Chasm (by Geoff Moore) and Purple Cow (by Seth Godin)