Why is the "Purple Cow" so important?
If you follow all of the other P's of marketing, create a strong budget, and create a strong start to a company, you should be able to succeed right? Wrong. Companies NEED to differentiate themselves in order to make a business or company successful. There are so many products now-a-days that are offered by countless brands. Take aspirin or even sliced bread for examples. Sure, when they first start off it is a lot easier to market. There is no competition. But as more and more brands join the bandwagon of aspirin or white bread, differentiating becomes increasingly difficult. How do you market your aspirin as being better than the other hundred types of aspirin?
People have less and less time to figure out what they want. Most people will opt for the aspirin they grew up with and trust. Why spend the time trying to figure out which new aspirin to try when Advil has worked for years? This means that a new aspirin company isn't marketing itself to people who already have favorites. They are going for the people with fresh eyes who are willing to spread knowledge of a brand through word-of-mouth. This narrows down the playing field to a much smaller crowd of potential customers.
Not only do people no longer have time, they are also becoming harder and harder to reach. With the huge influx of advertising that has shaken the world in the past decade, and the increase in usage of media, people are learning how to tune out all the unwanted adds. This makes reaching out to consumers extremely hard. What more could people need?
The last point that Godin brings up in this section is that people don't share knowledge of a product if they were satisfied with it. The huge increase in marketing has left people with too much information to handle. They are less likely to reach out to a friend and tell them about a great new product they discovered. It needs to have some glam or wow factor (Purple Cow factor) to make sharing it worthwhile.
Some say that "design" has become the wow factor in marketing. That is, while there's no real way to differentiate products, companies can use design to convince buyers that their (similar) product is the one to buy. Go into Target, for example, and you see designer plungers, designer ice scrapers, and designer dust pans. Kinda seems silly--and wasteful. Does this concern Godin at all?
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