Eaon Pritchard: Head of Digital Strategy at Geronimo
Seth Godin: Purple Cow
I first encountered
Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’ around 2004, I think it had been out for a year or
so. At the time I was working as Creative Director with an online gaming firm,
I had a gut feeling that we were approaching both the design the marketing of
our product from the wrong angle.
I was under pressure
to conform the look and feel of our games to look similar to the other casinos
and gaming sites and the press ads, online ads etc were just not delivering the
traffic.
I knew we had to do
something but was not sure what.
I was pointed to
‘Purple Cow’ by the manager of one of the local branches of a well know book
retailer. He was a convert and had used the principles of Purple Cow to turn
around the fortunes of his store the previous year. He had been voted store manager of the year
at the company’s conference and also went on to receive industry wide
recognition at the national book awards as bookseller of the year.
I’ll have some of
that, I thought.
In a nutshell, Seth
describes ‘Purple Cow’ as:
‘a
manifesto for marketers who want to make a difference at their company by
helping create products and services that are worth marketing in the first
place. It is a plea for originality, for passion, guts, and daring. ..Today,
the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be
remarkable."
Some say that Seth
Godin can be too simplistic (the advertising plannersphere may look down it’s
nose at him) I prefer to call him accessible.
Anyone can pick up
this book and get something out of it., and it gives you a framework for
judging the worth of an idea - simply
ask yourself ‘why is this idea totally
remarkable? Why would anyone bother to tell anyone else about it? Where is the ‘purple cow’ in this idea?
I’d like to be able to
finish off the story by saying I used the cow to transform the gaming company
from also-rans to world beaters. No such luck.
But reading this book
was the first step for me in realising that it was not enough to just make
pretty pictures, I had to get interested in the ‘reasons why’. I also realised that this was not going to
happen in the job I was in so I quickly left (see another essential Seth title
‘The Dip’).
