Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (Buch)

This book is a quick, entertaining, and insightful on the importance of creativity in marketing. It is much easier to rely on the "proven" methods of the past - and Godin is not interested in eliminating them...instead, he asks questions that try to help your product become the Purple Cow among the normal looking cows that litter the landscape.

Godin also introduces another term (in line with Gladwell's Tipping Point) called "sneezers." These are people who you win them over and they will tell hundreds - just like a sneezer spreads a virus.
I have a couple of events coming up this year, and his perspective along with Gladwell have totally changed my marketing approach.

the Purple Cow is an excellent book for anyone in any type of business. It talks about the importance of creating your Purple Cow to get noticed. It talks about Purple Cows that other business owners have successfully created.It also talks about what happens to companies that don't create a Purple Cow. An excellent book about " thinking outside the box" marketing.

In my opinion this book is no more than a random collection of superficial thoughts & observations. There is no depth. Nothing substantial can be gathered from this book.

I find the author's 1 page, vague recommendations completely useless. (Refer to "what should tide do? What should hallmark.com do?") There is nothing much in it that can be acted upon.

Overall it was an interesting book, due to the fact I have very little knowledge of marketing. I am a non-business major college student that is interested in business related books. Nothing in this book will blow you socks off, nor is any of it really boring. Two major problems I have with this book are:

1) The very short examples he gives of companies that either A) successfully use his techniques or B) use older methods to advertise. To clarify, he gives many examples in this book of companies all of us have heard of (Coca-Cola, Intel, Microsoft, etc.) yet he does not describe the situation in enough depth in order to grasp what it is that makes this a special case. This is VERY frustrating when you are reading this book to learn about this topic and are left with more questions than answers (at least it feels this way).
2) The second being the actual content of his examples and where he gets his support. During sections of this book I would question the reliably of the facts he gave. Once I read the section on lottery tickets dealing with probability and how it is affected by tickets sales I knew for a fact that he had completely got this section wrong. After checking an internet source I found support for my thoughts on the subject (Odds are not affected by tickets sales. Support found on msn money search poor people lottery). Once this happened the book became less of a source for information and more a book to read to take up time.

Overall some information will be useful, but don't buy this book in the hopes of turning your next business venture into the next "Pet Rock" or "Google".....

Sure we (the marketing crowd) all know this already. We know world is getting so fast you have to find a way to be remarkable. We know if we dont find that way we will get lost in the masses and become invisible. But sometimes we forget it in our daily business. I dont necessarily agree with the whole ideavirus idea. But I do believe in being remarkable. I also believe being remarkable is all about creating a relevant remerkable temporary monopoly, and competing on the level where noone else has gone (yet. hence temporary). Is it easy to do? No. Its ok to be reminded of it in a book compact enough to act as a wake up call. Easy read for non-marketing people as well.