The purple cow marketing strategy is pretty simple… What piques your interest more a Purple Cow or a brown cow? Obviously a purple cow… It’s not every day you see a purple cow.
Well this concept is from Seth Godin and it comes from his marketing book Purple Cow. The idea is simple… the standard marketing techniques the “proven practices” don’t work anymore. Everyone is doing it these days and your bang for your buck is not there.
Now Seth wrote this book back in 2002 just as TV ads were starting to decline in effectiveness and alternative more targeted advertising like Google Ads came on the scene. Well in 2020 boy has the landscape shifted even further. With Facebook and Instagram ads starting to become expensive and less effective.
Yet, the core principles in Purple Cow remain.
Purple Cow Marketing Principles
You have to be remarkable in some way to truly win and today that is usually starts with your product or service. What is that you do differently than everyone else and makes you unique.
How can you challenge the status quo? An example Godin uses is Curad the bandage company. Band-aid was literally synonymous with bandages. They had cornered the market and were winning. Yet a new company came in Curad and decided to print cartoon characters on their bandages. Kids wanted superman and batman on their boo-boos. They didn’t want a regular old band-aid. This was Curad’s purple cow marketing strategy that made their product stand out. Thus Curad managed to create a huge opportunity through approaching a boring old product with a new purple cow idea.
As more and more competition rises in a crowded market you have to be unique enough to create natural buzz. The best type of marketing is the free kind that comes from your customers. How can you create a product or service that is so darn unique that people can’t stop talking about it?
Where’s the step-by-step guide?
Godin doesn’t have a fancy formula or step-by-step instructions on how to create your own purple cow marketing strategy, but does give plenty of examples to follow. If you look for the edges and find inspiration outside of your own industry, you are more likely to identify a purple cow.
The other important takeaway is that a great product isn’t enough. You have to utilize purple cow marketing to truly rise above the noise and be unique. Find your purple cow, own it, love it, nurture it and most of all be proud of it.
If you’d like to read it yourself, get the book here.