Imagine your driving down a country road in kansas, on the side of the road there are hundreds of cows grazing for as far as the eye can see.

After driving for several hours you look on the side of the road and you see a purple cow.  That’s right a purple cow.

What would you do?

You would probably tell the next 10 people you talked to if not more.

You might talk about it years later, you might even take pictures and post them online.

One of the biggest points that Seth stresses in this book is that your product is your marketing.  Your product is your marketing, think about it! it represents itself.

In today’s day and age a lot of companies are spending millions of dollars in marketing just to bug people.  Who cares about what your saying about your product or service?

It’s much smarter to spend money innovating your product and making it better so that the users talk about it and make more sales for you because they like it so much.

The thing I love about this book is that seth take’s companies that are using the purple cow effectively and shares with you why and how they are using the purple cow so well.

I love any book that take’s great companies and shows you why they are great, seth does that throughout this book and you learn so much from it.  This is a must-have business book if you want to grow your marketing and innovation both.

There are 5 P’s in marketing.

- Product

- Price

- Promotion

- Placement

- People

In this book the “Purple Cow” is another marketing P.  This is a new way to market a new way to get attention in what seems to be the most attention grabbing time in our history.

Your purple cow is your product, it should market itself.

The companies that will thrive will be the one’s innovating and developing the newest cutting edge products.  Think about apple, they have the priciest “mp3 players” yet everyone will gladly pay more.

People don’t even call them mp3 players anymore! they say ipod regardless of whether it’s an ipod or not!

That is a product, a brand and a business that market’s itself.  That is what seth is talking about.

Find your uniqueness and build on that.  The message is to create and NOT to compete!

Spend more time focusing on your products and services and stop thinking of new ways to bug people.

Marketing and advertising shows up in new areas and people notice it for a little bit but then they figure out how to block it out.  Start delivering value and giving away something for free.

In the book seth talks about the “Free prize” in the cereal box.  That was the only reason that mom’s bought that cereal for their children.

A free toy got them to buy the box of cereal.

So… where’s your free toy? What make’s you different? unique? likable?

Think about where your purple cow is and make that the strong area of your business and spend the most time there.

I really got a lot out of Seth godin’s material.  He is an amazing author and also the owner of squidoo.com which is a site that allows you go create squidoo lenses which are web pages that you can post content too.  Whether text or video it’s a great place to share valuable content to market and a great way to get targeted traffic from the search engine.

I hope that you got something out of this blog post.

Pick up the book and benefit from it! please share!

David King,