Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2015, and the context and circumstances it describes reflect that time.
If you have a business idea and offer your customers a good product or service, that won’t be enough these days, because, according to Seth Godin, good is now mediocre. So what’s the best way to approach an idea?
Marketing is changing by leaps and bounds. More and more, we’re bombarded with advertising wherever we go: on television, on websites, while watching YouTube videos, and so on.
Yet there are products that don’t bombard us with advertising and still, for some reason, catch people’s attention, and it’s those users themselves who tell their friends and family about the product. It’s the most effective advertising there is: word of mouth.
See also: Seth Godin: tenacity is not the same as persistence
But this kind of advertising doesn’t work with just any product
Seth Godin compares it to the purple cow, the title of one of his best-known books, in which he set out some ideas that entrepreneurs should bear in mind when they study their business ideas and want to take a product to the end customer.
If you’re driving along a road and see a cow, you won’t stop or pay more attention than usual, because you’re used to seeing cows. But if the cow were purple, it would catch your attention immediately, because it’s different.
It doesn’t matter how much an advertiser pays to show us 100 cows every day: they won’t capture our attention. But if someone puts a purple cow in front of us, they’ll have our attention without spending anything on advertising.
So these days, the success of a business idea doesn’t depend on whether products are better or worse. In principle, it’s enough for them to be different, eye-catching and provocative.
According to Godin, you have to look for differentiation, because it works better than perfection.
The riskiest thing you can do today if you want to sell a product is to play it safe. Today you have to play right at the edge and be extraordinary at the few things you know how to do well.
Work out what people want, and give it to them
People have more and more options “of everything” to choose from, but less time, so they will also discard more products. How do you catch someone’s attention ahead of a huge range of products? Above all, by being different.
In the video below, taken from a talk Godin gave at TED, he gives many examples of products that doubled or tripled their sales with a few small changes, changes that nonetheless made a difference on a large scale.
To work out what people want, the first thing we need to do is find out who our target audience is: the users who are passionate about, or very interested in, what we’re going to sell them and the area in which we’re going to stand out.
He gives the example of hot sauce and mustard. There are many varieties of hot sauce, because lots of people are passionate about hot sauce. Mustard, on the other hand, has hardly any variety or innovation, because it doesn’t have a big enough audience to make it worth racking your brains over how to stand out.
Here is the video of Seth Godin’s talk, which is well worth watching for anyone looking to stand out in their industry.
Seth Godin is considered one of the most influential marketers of our century, and one of his best-known books is Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.
Watch: Seth Godin’s TED talk
See also: Seth Godin’s philosophy and lessons: the 5 essential steps to success
Featured image: Betsy Weber, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
