Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsA Must Read for Marketers
Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2020
Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin.
First published in 2003, and again in 2005, and again in 2019, The Purple Cow resonates with aspiring and seasoned marketers alike for it’s timeless message; BE REMARKABLE. Seth Godin is a champion of the marketing industry, making a name for himself by selling his marketing firm to Yahoo for 30 million dollars and then becoming their vice president of direct marketing. At the same time he began writing marketing books, to which Purple Cow in only one of many. Yet, its message is worth the three hours it will take to read it. Whether new to marketing or refreshing your ideas, you’ll want to consider the bullet points Godin has to offer within these pages.
When Godin speaks, people listen. This book is primarily base on his personal opinion and therefor scrutinized, yet it holds major weight for those individuals about to jump into the melting pot of marketing that Godin so wittingly has mastered.
Out with the old, in with the new. Marketing has evolved, according to Godin, and innovation is the key to success. He believes it would be a waste of energy to focus on products and services that already exist for the masses. Developing new products or services for a market that is not saturated but small and specific is the new key to success. His message is throttling innovators forward with the idea they must put extreme amounts of effort into standing out from the crowd. He provides multiple case studies of companies that have done so, such as Starbucks, and Dutch Boy Paint. His examples shed light on a different way of thinking that is so inspiring! It will spark you to try harder, search deeper, and expand your reach much farther than you had originally anticipated.
If you are dealing with attempting to re-spin an old idea into a new one, he uses the example of Dutch Boy, the painting company who changed the idea of the paint can, making it so much more user friendly than the old one that the companies’ sales went up, their distribution broadened, and their retail price instantly increased.
Godin’s approach to advertising leaves some weary of his methods. He believes television ads are in the stone ages and Internet banners are a complete waste of time. He has the statistics and the experience to back it up. His ideas stray from the typical mass media approach and hone in on investing in an idea and then spreading that idea to particular individuals that will find it remarkable, interesting, and a must have. This foreign concept seems like the long game to me, finding people to like a product, try it and then tell their friends, takes time. Yet Godin offers streamlined examples of how this can be done. Influencers on Instagram suddenly made much more sense. The entire format of Instagram and how it caters to like-minded individuals who feed off of each other’s ideas and inspiration is an absolute gold mine for what Godin proposes. It makes perfect sense. I would also gather, that the folks disagreeing with the value of this book may not be fluent in the social media formats younger generations have now grown accustom.
Godin sheds light on subjects not otherwise considered unless you’ve already read some of his other books in which case his ideas are similar and reiterated. He’s a master of marketing, and this book contains keys you might not otherwise have considered. Learn as much as you possibly can to succeed, explore every option at your disposal, and the remarkable will be within reach! 5 stars, and a quick easy, concrete, authentic read. In fact, I read it twice.
