Marketing guru and "Agent of Change" Seth Godin encourages people to create Purple Cows - things that are truly remarkable.
"Purple Cow" is a term that Marketing Guru Seth Godin uses to describe a remarkable product or service. He coined it for the best-selling marketing book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. The basic premise of Seth's book is that traditional marketing doesn't work anymore (a common theme in all his writing) and that the best way to market successfully is to start by creating unique, remarkable stuff that people want to talk about.
Here is one of my favourite Purple Cow quotes:
"...we face two choices: Either be invisible, uncriticized, anonymous, and safe or take a chance at true greatness, uniqueness, and the Purple Cow. The point is simple, but it bears repeating: Boring always leads to failure. Boring is always the riskiest strategy. Smart businesspeople realize this and work to minimize (but not eliminate) the risk from the process. They know that sometimes it's not going to work, but they accept the fact that that's okay."
I want to scream at my monitor every time I read about someone wanting to do their own take on Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, those ideas aren't new or original and I don't think people will respond to them because they are not remarkable. If your goal is just to clone what's already been done (and the mainstream media does that a lot) by all means go ahead. But if your goal is to get attention, have a large audience and be successful you are probably wasting your time.
A search for "puppet" on YouTube will return over 16,000 videos and the site has millions of other non-puppet videos. If you make a video and post it there why on earth should I, or anyone else choose to watch it? This is the difficult question that all content creators need to ask themselves. I think Seth's book suggests an answer, or at least a road map to one.
So make Purple Cows. Innovative, don't imitate. Make unique, remarkable stuff. It's hard work and you may fail many times before you succeed, but I think it's worth it.
There's an excerpt from Purple Cow that you can read online at Fast Company Magazine. There are also two "bonus chapters" available online here and here.
