Purple Cow

The argument that only remarkable products — literally worth remarking on — can be marketed, because advertising can no longer buy attention for an ordinary one.

Seth Godin, Purple Cow (2003)

What it does

Moves the marketing decision back into the product. If the thing is not worth talking about, the budget is being spent to compensate for it, and the honest fix is to change the thing. As an argument for putting money into the offer rather than the campaign, it is hard to beat.

When it breaks

It is defined so that it cannot fail. A product that sold was remarkable; one that did not was a brown cow; the test only becomes available after the result. The measurement points the other way too — buyers perceive very little differentiation between the brands they actually buy, and success does not track perceived differentiation. What does the work is distinctiveness, being instantly recognisable, which is a memory property rather than a remarkable one and is built by repetition the model has no place for.

Case

Romaniuk, Sharp and Ehrenberg challenged the central importance of differentiation to brand strategy on empirical grounds, arguing that it plays a far smaller role than brand strategy assumes. Millward Brown — whose commercial model is built on differentiation — replicated the analysis on their own data and reported the same pattern: successful brands score low on perceived differentiation.

Romaniuk, Sharp & Ehrenberg — Evidence Concerning the Importance of Perceived Brand Differentiation, Australasian Marketing Journal (2007) ↗

Diagram not yet drawn

A field of brown cows with one purple; beside it the same field a year on, every competitor repainted, the purple cow now indistinguishable — remarkability drawn as a depleting stock rather than a property.

In the wild

Unchecked · not part of the tier

What people have written about this tool in the last twelve months. A machine found these and nobody has read them. Everything above this line was checked by hand.

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