Purple Cow

Purple Cow declares the TV-industrial complex dead: the era when average products for average people won through advertising volume ended with attention scarcity. Driving past fields of brown cows, you notice only a purple one — so remarkability must be designed INTO the product, not sprayed on afterward. Market to the early adopters who seek new things (the sneezers), make something they'll remark on, and let them carry it across Moore's chasm for you. Safe is risky; very good is the most dangerous thing to be.

'Very good is bad' — competence is invisible; the sneezers as the only audience worth launching to; 'if it's not remarkable, it's invisible'; the otaku concept — passionate niches notice first; and the book's own launch as proof — first sold via his site packaged in actual milk cartons, which got remarked upon precisely as prescribed.

Twenty years on, its thesis runs the creator economy and product-led growth — distribution now belongs to whatever users mention. Its limit is survivorship and category-dependence: utilities and insurance can't all be purple, and Ehrenberg-Bass evidence says distinctiveness plus availability grows brands that remarkability never touches. Read it as a product-design challenge and an honesty test — would anyone miss this? — not as a universal growth law.

Written after Godin's Permission Marketing years at Yahoo!, the cow metaphor came from a family drive through France — fields of cows, all unremarkable after the first. Portfolio published it May 2003; the first run sold through his website, shipped in milk cartons.

Etymology: source.

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

View interest-over-time on Google Trends →

Areas of marketing where purple cow is a core concern: