Today, we’re continuing our series of B2B book reviews by taking a look at Purple Cow by Seth Godin. You may remember that a little while ago, we took a look at Permission Marketing, his groundbreaking release that inspired the modern inbound marketing methodology. If you haven’t read that, don’t worry – because Purple Cow is totally different.

The interesting thing about Seth Godin is that he doesn’t really specialise in any particular area. Most other authors and thought leaders focus on sales, marketing or strategy, but Godin approaches business as a whole – and that’s what you can expect from Purple Cow.

In many ways, the name says it all. The idea here is pretty simple – people pay no attention to cows. We know what they look like and if we’re driving through the countryside and we see one, we don’t pay them much attention. But a purple cow? Now that’d be something remarkable.

Being remarkable

‘Remarkable’ is the key word here, because the book is all about making sure that your business has some sort of edge that makes it worth talking about. And the thing to remember here is that this isn’t necessarily some marketing trick but rather something that should be applied at a base level of your business. After all, if your product itself isn’t remarkable, no amount of marketing will make up for it.

This highlights the need for B2B companies in particular to make sure that the product or service that they offer is at the top of its game – and that it’s so good that people will talk about it without being prompted. This doesn’t mean that you have to totally upend your company, though. You can quite often turn your regular old brown cow into a purple cow by adding new features and functionality that your customers would kill for. You just need to identify a pain point and then find a way to solve it.

What’s interesting about Purple Cow is that beyond the key principle that it espouses, there’s not a whole lot more to it. It does include a checklist that you can use to create remarkable products of your own and a whole heap of useful examples to give you some inspiration, but the truth is that once you’ve wrapped your head around the basic concept, you’re pretty much ready to apply it. Now you just need to add a dash or two of your own creativity.

More on Seth Godin

One of the most interesting things about Purple Cow is the way it was released. The first print run came packaged as a milk carton and readers only had to pay shipping and handling. Godin has used the same purple cow approach on several of his other books too, and it’s well worth reading them to see more examples of the methodology being applied to a tangible product.

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