 What is a purple cow? Well, if you've been driving around some farmland, generally you'll see brown cows, white cows, spotted cows, basically you'll see boring ass cows that you have seen before. Imagine you're driving and then all of a sudden you see a purple cow. Now a purple cow that will grab your attention and that's the whole point of Seth Godin's book, The Purple Cow. It's about something being remarkable, something being innovative, right? You see he starts off by talking about how marketers use to follow the old model, which is the TV industrial complex model, in which they'll make generic products and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing for them, marketing the products to the mass media. And because this was the early days when things were starting off, the mass media will consume the shit out of this and go and buy those products. They'll buy the Colgate, they'll buy whatever's on TV, because if you were able to get on TV and put an ad on there, you can almost guarantee that you're going to make sales. So it's a win-win situation, right? As long as you had a good marketing campaign and the money to pay for it, you're always going to make a profit. Now fast forward a couple of years and things have changed. People are now more, they have more options. Their attention cannot be kept at one place. They want to go everywhere. There's heaps of people trying to grab their attention due to the internet and social media. If you go online right now, there'll be hundreds of people trying to grab your attention with different messages and, hey, buy this product. Hey, look at this. Hey, what's up over here? But the chances are you won't be paying attention. People have become good at ignoring the marketers, so the old model doesn't work anymore, because people ignore it. I'm sure you guys have seen the little ad on Google Chrome or Firefox ad block. You just block the ads these days. You don't have to watch them. You have to endure the bullshit. So ads don't work as effectively as they used to because of all the saturation in the market in these modern day and age. But a lot of companies are still doing the same shit that they did back in the 80s, 70s, 60s. They're still popping ads thinking that it's the way to go. Well, Seth Godin, Seth Godin says that this is not the way to go. That if you want to market for the new age, you have to put the marketing in the product. The product itself has to be innovative. You can't just market boring shit and expect people to buy it these days. People are smarter than that. There's too many options. If everything's on the same playing field, people will go for the cheaper option. So unless you want to make your products cheaper and have a price war with your competitor, in which you both end up being losers as your product will no longer serve a profit, each selling the product at an incremental lower cost than the other one, it doesn't work. You need to make the product market itself. Seth talks about how a lot of companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars into the marketing campaigns when they could just spend a fraction of that cost into improving the product. The idea is you improve the product, you make a remark up, you make it innovative. A little bit different to compare it to something that's worth talking about. And when you do that, the early adopters, the first people that are interested in the product, he calls them the sneezers, they will sneeze the idea onto their friends. So it's no longer niche targeted. The niche starts spreading it out to the masses and that's how you make an idea big these days. You start it with a small group and then you spread it. You spread it out as they or the group spreads it out to their friends and then you can start milking the cash cow, the purple cow for all this guy. You can't sell for a generic product because a generic product is going to get ignored. You need to invest in the product. That's why Seth says everyone in the company or a startup should be a marketer, should be part of the marketing process because the marketing process is the product creation process. Don't worry about marketing campaigns to begin with. Worry about making purple cows, making products that are worth talking about, that people actually give a shit about. No one cares about brown cows or white cows. Everyone wants a purple cow. Seth also talks about how if you want to make a purple cow, you need to try thinking about being the most of something. The most blue, the most red, the most big, the most small, the cheapest, the most expensive, the cleanest, maybe the smelliest, just anything that's going to distinguish you from the crowd that's going to accentuate your remarkableness. If you can do that, then people will be able to see you more clearly than you compare this and will generally choose you or whatever niche or sneezes are interested in whatever you're offering. Seth talks about how being generic or being normal is the most dangerous option you can take because you're almost guaranteeing that you're going to be ignored by the masses. Playing this safe is playing it dangerous because you're guaranteeing you're going to lose your money. You got to play it extreme or play it unsafe. Think about innovation. Think about pushing boundaries and not stopping just because it's the proper thing to do. Generally, companies that push a bit further are the ones that succeed, are the ones that become remarkable or go viral in this modern age and time. That's the purple cow guys. Be remarkable. Don't play safe. Focus on innovation and not marketing. The marketing is innovation. Yeah, just kick ass. That's it. Peace.