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1-Page Summary of Purple Cow

Overview

If you look at a field of cows, what color will most likely dominate the view? Black and white are probably the colors that will be most prevalent. Brown might also show up if there’s enough light. But it’s unlikely that you’ll see purple in a field full of black and white or brown cows. That is unless you’re lucky to find one purple cow among all those other colors! Your business needs to be just as unique as this purple cow for people to notice your product.

You’ll learn why your customers are the best marketers for you, how the Leaning Tower of Pisa attracts more visitors than any other building in Italy, and how being ridiculed can be a good thing.

Big Idea #1: Advertising is losing its power because it is so abundant.

You may have noticed that marketing is changing.

In the past, you would only see a few advertisements on TV or in newspapers. This made those products seem trustworthy and valuable because they were so scarce.

Today, there are numerous products being advertised in many different ways. This has made it hard to capture the consumer’s attention.

This is because people are too busy to notice all the marketing messages around them. The author provides an example of this in a hotel where he asked several people reading a newspaper to name two companies with full-page ads. No one could remember even two. People ignore marketing unless it meets their exact needs, as when they need a car or another product that’s being advertised.

This means that traditional advertising is becoming less effective. If you buy a television ad, many people will see it, but only a small fraction of those viewers actually want your product. Even fewer are willing to pay attention to the advertisement and even fewer still are willing to purchase your product.

Imagine you’re launching a new brand of pain relief medication. You need to overcome three obstacles:

To market pain relievers, you need to find people who want them and aren’t satisfied with current options. You also need to find customers who will listen to your message and buy the product. These trends make marketing increasingly challenging because it’s difficult to reach target markets.

Big Idea #2: To make your product or service stand out in the modern world, it has to be remarkable.

As we saw in the previous point, advertising is changing.

Looking at the history of advertising, we can see that there were three periods: before, during and after. Let’s take a closer look at each period.

Advertising is the oldest form of promoting a product or service. In this day and age, consumers talk about their experiences with products to other people in order to spread awareness of them. For example, if someone had an amazing experience with a vegetable seller on the market square, they might recommend that person’s business to others through word-of-mouth advertising.

After the advent of television, it was thought that advertising worked like magic. The more you advertised, the more sales and profits would increase. Therefore, companies could spend money on advertisements to increase their sales and profits which they then spent on even more advertisements in a cycle.

To get a product to stand out in the market and be noticed, it needs to be a Purple Cow. This is achieved through remarkable marketing. A great example of this is the new Volkswagen Beetle. The original Beetle was popular for many years, but its relaunch had to be done with remarkable marketing strategies.

The car was a great success because it had an attractive design and stood out from other cars on the road. The company also received good reviews, which helped increase its popularity even more.