Purple Cow

02What Exactly Is a Purple Cow?

A concept as bold and unusual as a brightly colored farm animal requires a very precise, actionable definition before we can start applying it to our own careers, businesses, and creative projects. Seth Godin frequently utilizes the word "remarkable" to define the absolute essence of this phenomenon, but he intends for us to understand it in the most literal, fundamental sense possible. When Godin says something must be remarkable, he means that it must literally be "worth making a remark about." It must possess a quality that compels human beings to stop what they are doing, take notice, and feel an overwhelming urge to discuss it with another person. It is incredibly important to understand that "remarkable" does not simply mean "good" or "high quality." This is one of the most common and dangerous traps that modern businesses fall into. In today’s hyper-competitive global economy, high quality is no longer a competitive advantage; it is the absolute bare minimum expectation. Let us look at the automotive industry for a moment. Thirty years ago, buying a car was a gamble. Cars frequently broke down, rusted rapidly, or suffered catastrophic engine failures. In that era, creating a highly reliable car that simply started every morning was a massive competitive advantage. Today, essentially every car manufactured by a major automotive brand is incredibly reliable. They all start in the cold, they all have excellent safety ratings, and they all drive smoothly. Because quality is ubiquitous, quality is completely invisible. A car that does not break down is not a Purple Cow; it is just a normal, functioning car. A Purple Cow is an interruption in the boring, highly predictable pattern of everyday life. Think back to the metaphor of the brown cows in the pasture. The very first time you see a herd of brown cows, perhaps as a child or on a rare trip to the countryside, they are quite lovely to look at. You might point them out to your family. But by the time you have driven past the twentieth herd, your brain has completely normalized the visual input. The cows have become part of the background scenery. Your brain conserves energy by ignoring them. But a Purple Cow shatters that pattern. It is so jarring, so completely out of place, and so undeniably fascinating that your brain is forced to process it. Many well-intentioned entrepreneurs and creators deeply confuse the concept of "very good" with "remarkable." The pursuit of "very good" is actually one of the most insidious traps in the business world. If you decide to open a brand-new coffee shop in your neighborhood and your entire business plan is to serve "very good" coffee in a clean, pleasant environment, you are almost certainly doomed to fail. Why? Because there are already ten other coffee shops in a three-mile radius doing the exact same thing. No consumer is going to completely alter their daily morning routine, drive past their usual cafe, and navigate a new parking lot just because your coffee is marginally, slightly better than the competition's. "Very good" simply does not generate enough conversational friction to change human behavior. Conversely, what if your new coffee shop served beverages exclusively in entirely edible, freshly baked cookie cups? Or what if you employed a staff of highly trained theatrical actors who delivered the coffee while performing dramatic Shakespearean monologues? Or what if you only offered one single type of coffee, but it was roasted specifically to match the exact astrological birth chart of the customer? These ideas might sound completely absurd, and frankly, they might even fail. But they are absolutely undeniable Purple Cows. They are perfectly designed to be talked about. If a customer experiences the edible cookie cup, they are virtually guaranteed to take a photograph, post it to their social media networks, and tell their coworkers about it later that morning. The exact opposite of remarkable is boring. In the modern economy, the word "boring" is the deadliest, most toxic word imaginable. A boring product is a dead product. It is crucial to understand that you cannot simply paint a brown cow purple after the fact. You cannot design a boring, average piece of software, or a bland, derivative novel, and then hand it over to a marketing agency and demand that they make it remarkable. The remarkability must be fundamentally baked into the DNA of the product from the very first brainstorming session. If the core offering is not inherently fascinating, no clever slogan, flashy logo, or viral social media campaign will ever be able to disguise the fact that you are simply trying to sell another invisible brown cow to a world that is already entirely full of them.

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