Marketers face an ever growing attention deficit from audiences. Prospects are increasingly inundated with ads from all angles, on TV, on their phones, on the streets that they no longer have time to pay attention. Ads have become repetitive and outright annoying.
How do you stand out in all the noise? How do you win this Marketing game? You can’t – if you want to reach your consumers, it’s time to change the game. Enter the Purple Cow! But first, let’s review the basics…
The 6 P’s of Marketing
For years, marketers referred to the essential Ps in order to make a campaign successful:
- Product
- Promotion
- Placement
- Packaging
- Price
- Publicity
This used to be an easy way to reference your work. If there was a check mark next to each of these Ps, you had done your job! While no marketing ever a bullet-proof path to success, this formula increased the likelihood of success.
 
In his book “Purple Cow,” Seth Godin remembers driving through France and seeing storybook cows on the plains. While the visual was immediately striking, something happened in just a few minutes. Those cows that were so beautiful had turned into something worse than repetitive. They had become boring! No matter how much light you put on any o f those cows, how much money you dump into the setting or the copy, there’s nothing that can be done to make that cow so interesting that it will stand out from the rest of his brothers and sisters. But a Purple Cow…
Purple Cow means Remarkable Marketing
A purple cow is remarkable. Godin writes that Remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. It’s exceptional. It’s New and interesting. Everything else is boring and invisible.
Remarkable Marketing is the art of building interesting and note-worthy things into your product or service.
The Marketing Team’s job has become run-of-the-mill. You make a list of all the benefits of the product, then you identify its target audience and finally, you dump a ton of money in taking your message to the audience.
Before, During and After the Age of Advertising
Before the Age of Advertising, sales relied on word of mouth.
During the age of Advertising, if you hired an advertising agency and spent money to target your audience, you would be sure to increase your sales! Imagine how fun it must have been to first market Aspirin which was a product that everyone on the planet needed and wanted! Today, a quick visit to your local store can give you a hundred options of pain relief medicine.
It was Advertising that made the bread-slicing machine a success. Back in 1912, Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread but it was a complete failure despite its remarkable innovation. It wasn’t until Advertising came into play with Wonder Bread with the right packaging and slogan “builds strong bodies 12 ways.” It wasn’t the convenience of the product that worked, but its marketing.
After the age of advertising, which is where we are now, consumers no longer have time for ads but they are still desperate for products that will make their lives better.
Understanding that Attention is an asset
Your customer’s attention is an asset and not just a resource to be mined and abandoned.
These days, Product Marketers can’t get their message across because their audiences don’t want to share their attention. They would much prefer relying on their trusted networks or group of friends than to lend an ear to the ads on TV.
So we have a major problem here. Today’s audience either doesn’t have the money to buy your product, it doesn’t have the time to hear your message and if they do have the time to hear it, they won’t want it. With this kind of problem, we’re not getting very far.
That’s why the Purple Cow is so important.
So many choices, so little time.
I recently visited a Nike store to buy a pair of shoes and was inundated with choices. Different categories, sports, lifestyle. There were at least 100 choices glaring at me. In the midst of all those choices and the amount of money that Nike is spending on advertising to retain their market share, no other brand of shoes has the remotest chance to compete. Would I consider spending my hard-earned money on a new brand of shoes only to end up being disappointed, wasting my money and having to return to Nike with my tail between my legs? Since time is so limited, I would prefer sticking to my tried-and-true network of trusted brands rather than trying anything new.
Now it would be an entirely different situation if a friend were to tell me “You have got to try these new shoes!”
So what changed?
Average Products no longer have legs. We need remarkable products!
We can no longer advertise to anyone. We advertise to early adopters.
Small changes can no longer grab our interest. We want big changes!
Not so fast… Purple Cow isn’t enough! Remarkable isn’t enough.
There isn’t a shortage of remarkable ideas. The problem is putting them into action. It’s the will to execute them. Seth Godin notes that “it’s safer to be risky.”
Remarkable, check! Will, check! Now what?
So you got the remarkable idea and have the will to execute it. But now is it shareable by the innovators and the early adopters? Is this a product that not only will catch their attention, but will they have an easy time communicating all of its benefits to their friends?
The mass market will ignore your ads and will refuse to hear about the product, but if it’s original enough to catch the innovators’ attention and is easy to talk about, then you will have a hit on your hands.
Conclusion
Here is a Los Angeles marketing company that will evaluate if you have a remarkable product that will be successful. You can get in touch with them and they will evaluate your brand and see if it is has legs for Television.
