Purple Cow’s final thoughts

Here are some excerpts from the last few pages of Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow“:

• Come up with a list of ten ways to change your product (not the hype) to make it appeal to a sliver of your audience.
• Think of the smallest conceivable market, and describe a product that overwhelms it with its remarkability.  Go from there.
• Outsource.  If the factory is giving you a hard time about jazzing up the product, go elsewhere.
• Build and use a permission asset.  Once you have the ability to talk directly to your most loyal customers, it gets much easier to develop and sell amazing things.
• Copy.  Not from your industry, but from any other industry.  Find an industry more dull than yours, discover who’s remarkable (it won’t take long), and do what they did.
• Identify a competitor who’s generally regarded as at the edges, and outdo them.  Whatever they’re known for, do that thing even more.  Even better, and even safer, do the opposite of what they’re doing.
• Find things that are “just not done” in your industry, and do them (e.g. a plastic surgeon could offer gift certificates).  Stew Leonard’s took the strawberries out of the little green plastic cages and let the customers pick their own – and sales doubled.
• Ask, “Why not?”  Almost everything you don’t do has no good reason for it.  Almost everything you don’t do is the result of fear or inertia or a historical lack of someone asking, “Why not?”