Purple Cow

Purple Cow explains why building a great product and advertising the heck out of it simply doesn’t cut it anymore and how you can build something that’s so remarkable people have to share it, in order to succeed in today’s crowded post-advertising world.

Seth walks us through the history of advertising and says there were three distinct periods.

Before advertising was way back in ancient times, when people could only spread the word about great deals with their mouths.

For example in ancient Rome, when one of the vendors on the market sold particularly good fish, everyone who bought one would of course tell all their friends and family. Likely, the next time they’d go to the market, they’d visit that same vendor.

During advertising was the time during the 18- and 19-hundreds, when advertising seemed to work like magic and the only limit to how much you could sell through it was how much you were able to buy. Billboards, ads in magazines, TV commercials, they all fall into this category.

But by now we’re in the era after advertising. Consumers completely ignore ads now and are already blind to banner ads online. Unless they’re looking for something specific, for example a car, people won’t look at car ads.

In the era we are in right now, we’ve gone back to word-of-mouth marketing, only that the word is now exchanged online, which makes news about good and bad products spread a lot more quickly, thanks to social media like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Because we live in a post-advertising world and the internet is such a noisy place, you have to be truly remarkable to stand out – like a purple cow among brown, black and white cows. Seth calls this remarkable marketing and without it, your product is doomed to fail. That’s why the riskiest thing you and your company can do right now, is to not take any risks at all. Following the trends and trying not to make any noise, won’t make you stand out, it will make you invisible. For example, Ford is a steady company, but they’re not very innovative. They do what they know to do, again and again, which is why their stock price has merely changed in 10 years. They’re a boring company. Take Porsche, and you see a company that’s always at the edge. In 2013, Porsche took a massive risk with the 918 project. They built a car with hybrid technology, which they’d never done before, the car cost eight times as much as any of their normal models, and they limited production to 918 units. But what they built was truly remarkable, the car caught major attention for…