Purple Cow, How to Be Remarkable, and the Secrets of Marketing in 2023: with Seth Godin

so what people don't understand about the purple cow is it's not about a gimmick or hype or doing something different it's about giving the people you serve something that they want to talk about if they think it's remarkable if they make a remark then it's remarkable if you think it is who cares [Music] Seth thank you so much for joining me on the livestock business podcast what a pleasure thank you for having me so I started the p-tex group over 20 years ago and I think the I owe you gratitude because it's when I read

the Purple Cow when I said something fresh now I can start my business oh well yeah because this is not a typical we need to be a little bit you know out of the box different than anybody else so I want to start there I want to ask you the following question is most people most marketers are usually try to do exactly like everybody else is doing and they're trying to just okay I'll do everything like you're doing but I'll just plug in my product my service and so on and so forth purple car was

a very fresh concept tell us a little bit the backstory behind it well um where to begin most people don't understand marketing at all they think marketing is hustle or hype or control or stealing people's attention it is none of those things some people think marketing is advertising which it used to be and for 100 years advertising marketing was the same thing because if you bought enough ads you would make enough money to buy more ads and the internet undid all of that marketing is telling a true story that resonates with your smallest Bible audience

that they want to hear that causes them to take action and to tell their friends so what people don't understand about the purple cow is it's not about a gimmick or hype or doing something different it's about giving the people you serve something that they want to talk about if they think it's remarkable if they make a remark then it's remarkable if you think it is who cares so so if you don't mind I want to go a little bit deeper and let's talk about a business when they're building their strategy on marketing so I

know that there's a common line that use a lot which is marketing is not about selling stuff it's about serving your customer but we all know that you could have the phenomenal product and if people don't know about it they don't know about it so so how do you how do you build your product and you focus a lot on building a remarkable product so what is the sequence you would tell a business owner somebody listening to the show how they approach marketing yeah so again the statement you just made is a track because you

said if people don't know about it it doesn't sell but people aren't going to hear about it because you told them to you don't have a big enough microphone you don't have a big enough megaphone you want to put your product on Amazon feel free but no one's going to see it no matter how much you hustle that if we think about the brands that have been built in the last 10 or 15 years whether it's things like Google or discourse or Facebook or chat gbt or we're thinking about things like Supreme the t-shirt company

right how many ads have you seen for Supreme zero so how did they hit 100 million or whatever it is in Revenue they have because they gave the seven people who started something to tell their 12 friends now they have 19 and then and then and then and then so it's 10 by 10 by 10. it's the way every single Network spiritual Community anything has ever spread you know think about Alcoholics Anonymous everyone has heard about Alcoholics Anonymous but it's Anonymous nobody knows where their headquarters are they don't run any ads how come you've heard

about heard about it because people whose lives were changed by it generously bring other people along the same thing happened with the instant pot right this is about it's a cool little invention but that's not how it became a a juggernaut and it's not because it was 89 it's because if you came over to my house for dinner after I made something in my instant pot I would tell you about so basically it's it's the remarkable part is that is the product of the service and and the marketing is a byproduct of it because that

person actually will share it with their with their community so to speak and the people that have influence around them and included in the product in the service is the story We Tell ourselves about it so when you walk into a podiatrist or chiropractor's office it feels different than a heart surgeon's office that has nothing to do with what the doctor is going to do it has to do with the story that they've built around what they do and almost every you know if you buy clothing you're probably not going to the store naked right

you already have clothes you're going to the store because you need to tell yourself a new story about how you look you need to tell yourself a new story about acquisition and the same thing goes through for almost every single thing we buy so let me let me let's so obviously if you have a great product and you're starting to get the word out there that's something that that's going to become a remarkable experience there's also something that you teach which is permission based marketing which is you know the the opposite of an interruption marketing

so obviously that's a little bit outside of of having referrals or having people talk about the product that's you going out and ultimately being in people's inbox could you explain a little bit more what the permission based marketing is well you're only in your in their inbox because they want you there and the reason they want you there is they heard about it from somebody else so someone hears about what you're doing so in my case someone forwards my blog to a friend they get the blog now what should they do well if they want

to they can click one button and now they can subscribe to my blog so I have permission to talk to them tomorrow and to keep talking to them until they say I've had enough of this that's different than me quote showing up in their inbox it's them inviting me in and so you know if you think about I don't know selling something in the shuttle you're not doing it by banging on people's doors and I'm coming up to a stranger what you're creating is an environment where someone wants to hear from you tomorrow who would

miss you if you were gone raises their hand and says I would like to hear from you so how does a small business or even a start a a new brand cut through the Clutter obviously uh it's it's always if you have a phenomenal product but you know I teach business owners and when I speak to business owners it's not about not every business is an idea not every idea is a business which means sometimes you get a phenomenal you could have a very basic product about the way you actually deliver the service and everything

around it is what makes it remarkable so to speak I guess business owner looking at their marketing in general like how would you advise a business owner to actually use their marketing budget so to speak in today's day and age so my personal belief is that the Clutter is your friend it's not your enemy and there's only two choices either your motto is you can pick anyone and wear anyone right so think about walking down some bizarre some Street where there's 18 different places that you can go to have lunch there's 18 different places you

can go to buy a coat and they're all hassling and haggling with you to come in that is a thousand-year-old tradition but it's not effective anymore because the internet is really good at sorting them by price and if you're just going to win because you're the cheapest one I'll find someone cheaper than you it's a race to the bottom the other motto is you can't pick anyone because I'm the only one I'm the only one who can give you this and it's not you know when you said breakthrough product I could tell you how a

locksmith could do this I could tell you how a pool installation company could do this I could almost anybody who makes any prosaic item the Trap is believing Amazon when they tell you you should fit in all the way and be a dollar cheaper that's good for Amazon but that's not good for you so how how should a business approach the marketing in general like meaning they know they need to get the gain market share so to speak obviously phenomenal product phenomenal service and everything around there to become remarkable but they do want to get

out there with permission-based marketing so you mentioned the pool installation let's let's use that as an example okay so Step One is what is the change you seek to make if you can't describe to me the change you're trying to make in the world then you're just showing up looking for a job without a boss the second thing is who are you trying to change who specifically so in the case of the person I'm thinking about he said there are a lot of people in the United States who don't have a pool but I don't

care about them I only care about people within 15 miles of my location who don't have a pool and I want people who could afford one but don't have one because they don't trust the people who sell pools they're afraid of being ripped off they are living in heat wishing they could go swimming but afraid to put in a pool because all the other pool installation people are going to rip them off that's my market those are the only people I'm trying to talk to I'm not trying to talk to anybody else okay so how

can I talk to them well I can give you a couple examples or ideas but in the case of the person I'm thinking about he started a Blog where he started listing every single way pool companies rip you off with photos with descriptions don't let them sell you this don't ask for that you don't want this make sure that and you just gave away every secret in the whole industry and he did not make his competitors happy but you can bet that people were talking about what he was doing and because they talked about it

more people were reading what he said and not if you're the kind of person that says I knew it I knew these people were all scammers and someone's giving away all the scams you probably are willing to subscribe to the blog and after three weeks or three months or three years of this you're like okay I'm ready you call a guy up that is the shortcut to building a business not figuring out how to run a bunch of flyers or ads somewhere and hoping to get some low hanging fruit because all the fruit's been picked

so I I think what I heard and I just want to make sure that our listeners paid attention to it is as much as you have to put an emphasis of who your target market is exactly as much you need to put an emphasis of who what target market is not and once you you once you have that down path now you know what pain point do it you know do they have or what what problem are you solving for that specific market right so I often tell the story of going to a restaurant that's

Now sort of famous and I'm a vegetarian I haven't had meat in more than 30 years and early on my family and I used to go and I said would you please leave the meat off because it's a vegetable dish I prefer it without it you save the money everyone's happy and the first few times they're like fine and the fifth time the chef turned to me and said you know what there's a vegetarian restaurant four doors down I think it would be better for both of us if we went there instead oh wow and

that was the day it became a famous restaurant that when you can say to somebody this is not for everyone and this might not be for you now you stand for something if you're not willing to say that then you're a narcissist so with all the Clutter and all the noise out there so you mentioned uh you know starting a blog and doing stuff we as business owners and marketers in particular and I want to speak a minute to the creative space out there because it's a creative environment now we have the the SOS the

shiny object syndrome I know you specifically I've been following me for years you stick to your blog every single day the way you create books and so on and so forth how do we manage that to not get oh now there's a new social media platform thread okay now we have to start posting there and all of a sudden we're just running from a little bit of everything in a lot of nothing so to speak how do we zoom into that well my blog had a hundred readers the first year and now it has more

than that how did that happen a lot more than that how did that happen it happened because people like you told somebody else being first in a medium can work if you are really first and you over invest in it but generally that's actually not what works the first people who are on YouTube don't currently win on YouTube the first people who are on Twitter aren't winning on Twitter going first is way overrated what we're looking for is not that you picked the right one there is no right one it's that you picked one and

so if you open your business in Cleveland don't say oh I should move to Tampa tomorrow because the hard part is showing up in Cleveland enough that people start telling other people this sounds so simple all of what I've been saying for 20 minutes sounds so simple except people don't have the patience to do this and they don't want the responsibility of standing for something and so in the words of Zig they become a Wandering generality instead of a meaningful specific and you know there's a long history of you know walking into stores on 42nd

Street and they say and you say what do you got they said what do you need well yeah no then you don't stand for anything so you're saying that the medium is is less important than the consistency of of what how you show up and the change you seek to make who exactly is it for how will you know if you are earning more trust so that you can make more change for the people you seek to serve and if you're not making a change then you're just a clerk and you're always going to struggle

so I want to move into to understand the connection between marketing and sales uh I know you know they're very connected and a lot of times we see phenomenal marketing but then you drop the ball in the how you operate how connected is marketing with sales go uh my friend Anthony is a brilliant sales trainer and what I have said to him is I think that sales is what happens when we add unscalable human emotion to the marketing equation a human being looking into you in the eye and transferring emotion to you that we as

humans have a chance to dance with other people so Google doesn't have a sales force Facebook doesn't have a sales force giant corporations don't have sales forces and neither does Shake Shack right that it's like there's a someone who will take your money but the marketing does all the work on the other hand it's entirely possible that that conversation that you have with you know a skin specialist is why you finally had those pre-cancerous moles removed because in that moment enough emotion was transferred that trust was earned so we have to figure out what's the

balance between the two in New York City right now there are a lot of restaurants that don't have a phone anymore because they realize the people who are answering the phone were just clerks anyway they weren't doing any selling why bother answering the phone just let a computer do it on the other hand there are some restaurants in New York where if you're a regular you have a number and when you call a human who cares about you will take care of you you're going to pay twice as much deed at that restaurant but that's

okay because part of what you were paying for is the sales work of someone answering the phone so as far as of if you're looking where marketing is going and in sales you know you've been in in this industry for a very long time so I know on the part of what marketing needs to do didn't change but a lot has changed what would you say is where's the the most significant change that happened in the last 30 years in the marketing and sales world I would say the biggest shift at the fat end of

the market where most of money is spent is TV shows went from having 70 million viewers when they were successful to 3 million now that a pop record in the 1990s would sell 10 million copies and now we'll sell a hundred thousand copies we're talking about a hundred to one difference of attention that the whole world has splintered that there is no story person brand that everyone is talking about that's over the long tail is here and it's not going away so shifting our mindset from everyone to someone that's number one and number two your

customers probably know more about the market and your competitors than you do so you can't trick them if you want to have fun go to a car dealership and open your laptop when you're negotiating the price because what would become very obvious the salesperson is that right there at your fingertips you know the inventory and price of every car all around us they can't do what they used to do and so we have to embrace that fact you can't fight it I want to shift the conversation to to one of your recent books the you

know which is the the song of significance I think it's a very important topic and I know people know you a lot about the marketing but I think this is equally important especially for the for I would say the next decades where we see so much change in culture as far as Leaders people working and so on and so forth first tell us a little bit with the essence of the book as far as what made you go that direction and write this book well I'm hopeful this will be found to be significantly more important

than the marketing work I've done it's about work that matters for people who care it's about the end of the Industrial Age as we've been talking about for a while and moving to what are we going to do now what are we going to do now that we have all this privilege and all this Revenue but the world is melting uh people are quitting their jobs we're trying to figure out what we do all day and why and we have a chance if we care enough to not just be a cog in the system but

to actually choose to matter and that still comes back to what does our day feel like how we filling our business are we saying we are hustling and undercutting and hiding or are we getting real with people about what we're here to do and how we're going to do it with each other who's it for and what's it for so it informs our marketing choices but it begins with what kind of human do we want to be and who do we want to be surrounded by how did the the role of a leader change in

the last decade well I would say we actually have seen a shift from managers and managers are important but not as important as they used to be to leaders so managers follow the rulebook tell you what to do they use power and authority to get results so lots of businesses depend on managers leadership is voluntary leadership is about lighting a path forward and seeing who will follow you it's about exploring the liminal space between here and there about doing something that might not work because we can and it requires the people who you work with

to voluntarily come along for the ride not because you're being strict and saying these are the rules but because you're saying this is what we seek to achieve who wants to come and whenever there is change in the world leadership always defeats management we've seen it now we're just about creeping out of of the you know covid-19 and we we saw a lot of companies pivot a lot of lead like a lot of leaders shine through the times and some companies will have you know significant scars for the rest of their you know the you

know their the life of the brands While others have been able to cultivate a culture of Excellence so to speak with their team from your research and what you have seen where you know what sets the party like what would see the the significant difference between those two leaders well I think it comes down to trying to control the present to restore as a past versus trying to dance with the present to invent the future so if you have a giant office building in New York and you're paying 10 million dollars a month in rent

and you need everyone to come back to work you're trying to reinvent the past well maybe you could get away with that except you have a competitor that is willing to get rid of their building pay their people more give them more freedom have them not do dry cleaning anymore or fight the commute and connect in the way you and I are connecting faster and more intimately than what's going on in the office well who do you think is going to win that and it's not just about the real estate it's mostly about this idea

of control there's a big difference between Golf and surfing golf is this incremental path to Perfection can I cut one stroke off what I'm doing and they never change the course unless it's a big deal unless they really need to surfing the wave is different every single time that's a feature it's not a bug it's what people look forward to so if we're going to live in these chaotic times I hope we can understand we're surfing now we're not playing golf anymore and what we said you know like there's a lot of people that say

that we lost you know obviously it's all about human connection obviously uh we're also talking now we're having this human interaction in conversation but as far as the younger generation of of leaders in order to Foster that relationship in order to be around other leaders and being in a room and communicating and and having those conversations do you think in the long term this will be replaced with technology and zoom and everything like that or is there is there a place in a time and place where these interactions have to happen face to face though

I saw some uh 20 year olds out on a date and they're spending the whole time each looking at their phones and I saw eight kids walking through the mall and the whole time they were each looking at their phones and I got some photos back from a conference that I attended virtually last week everyone else was there in person and the people in the room looked like they were in school they were so unhappy and they were so bored uh fortunately it wasn't my talk but we have the ability to connect with people it

doesn't happen because we're in person with them it happens because we want to and you know if I talk to somebody and say do you wish you had a chance to have another conversation with your mom or your grandmother or someone who's passed away most people would say yeah I wish I could do that and the question is if you could have that conversation would you bring your phone and the answer is probably not well you could have that conversation do you think it could still be magic if you had it on zoom and the

answer is of course so what we're really talking about here is does a human being care enough to actually connect and institutions that are going virtual many of them are going to fail because it's an easy way to not show up but some of them I spent over a year as a full-time volunteer building this book the carbon Almanac we never met once 300 of us now 1900 of us in 90 countries wow and these are some of my closest friends because we cared enough to dance and that is where the song of significance lies

in creating the conditions for people to actually care speaking about leadership and in companies obviously we've seen a huge shift of of purpose-driven Brands we didn't have it in the in the early years it was all about the p l and the bottom line now you see large corporations and from a marketing perspective or you know you like to dig in so to speak how do you sift through to know which ones are just putting up on the website because that's the Style versus companies that really care about their mission and their purpose versus the

bottom line of course you need the bottom line but ultimately there is a mission there that drives everybody to perfection my default is assume that somebody is being disingenuous assume that it's a facade Milton Friedman said something wrong something incorrect and something dangerous when he said that the only purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value that's not written down anywhere he just made that up if companies are made up of people people have a lot of purposes and they need to make enough money to be there tomorrow but that is not why they

are there and when you are looking for an organization that serves purpose what I would ask you is how much did it cost them because if they are serving purpose and making more money while doing it then wait I'm happy that they have a tool but they are serving the goal of making more money and when you see corporations big ones make decisions that they know are going to harm the culture that they live in I don't understand it I don't understand why Facebook takes political ads I don't understand why Google puts companies out of

business that they don't have to do that to they could make everything additive and they would make plenty of money and so yeah we're starting to talk more about purpose but I gotta say when the climate gets just a little bit worse we're going to really see hard conversations take place just because you can make money building a coal plant doesn't mean you should I think this is something we could all test because because like you said either putting the money where the mouth is so to speak or is it just a marketing cover-up I

need to use the last few minutes to speak about AI I'm not going to leave the conversation without speaking about AI now I heard a line that used and I and I've actually repeated it in one of the recent episodes with one of our other guests which you feel that AI is doing similar to what electricity did which it's not to replace it's not to it's not basically replacing a people it's actually just maximizing so either you work with AI or AI will replace you so to speak there is a lot of conversation to see

what is it is you know let's call it The Good the Bad and the Ugly of a tragedy PT or anything in AI related how do you see it overall and how can we some practical advice for business owners how to adapt so I use it every day half an hour an hour a day if you're not doing that I don't think you can have an active role in the conversation to watch it teach me how to do some sophisticated computer programming in conversation just stunning it's it's an extraordinary magic trick it is a magic

trick it doesn't have a noise in its head like we do but it pretends it does so well that it's almost impossible to use it without falling for the trick but it's also a productive trick and so what I was talking about with electricity is this when Thomas Edison was fighting with George Westinghouse about AC versus DC he invented the electric chair and also started electrocuting elephants to persuade people just how dangerous AC power was and I could go on and on about how dangerous electricity was but the point is electricity changed every single thing

in the world it changed night into day it changed productivity it changed what we made it changed everything and since the invention of electricity we have invented more than 10 billion jobs for people on earth so it created all these things for people to do AI is going to have just as many speed bumps there's going to be some really bad things that are done by really bad people using AI at some sort of scale and the new Mission Impossible movie gives a little bit of a hint of that but it's entirely possible it's happening

right this minute and maybe the world will end nothing I can do about that but what I can tell you is until that happens you have this patient thoughtful magic trick that you can use over and over and over again to discover things and panic isn't going to do us any good but leadership could change the game what will be some practical advice for business owners of listening to this episode to say okay I hear so much about AI I'm not sure exactly how to start using it what would be some practical ways to start

incorporating AI in Daily productivity or daily growth of businesses okay so the first thing I would encourage you to do is not defend the business you have now that a well-known academic went to see a zen master and said to the Zen master I'm here for a few minutes please teach me everything I need to know about Zen and the Zen master was pouring him a cup of tea and he just kept pouring and pouring and pouring and pouring and it's overflowing onto the table the guy says stop what are you doing the Cup's already

full he says yes exactly I can't teach you about Zen because you've shown up with a cup that's already full so if you're saying to me how do I preserve my existing business your Cup's already full I can't tell you but if you're willing to start over you know when random house and Simon and Schuster and penguin saw the internet they could have started Google because they after all are in the business of organizing information instead they said how do we use search engines to sell more books that was a big mistake here's this tool

that is always on is almost free and knows everything how we'll use this new tool in a world where real estate isn't as important trans shipping stuff isn't as important Amazon isn't as important where can you create value and if you chase that just for two weeks thinking about it maybe you'll figure out how to bring it into the business you already have but it's a mistake to say I do X how do I take a new tech and add it to what I do instead it's here's a new tech here are some customers what

do they need one of the things I I heard you say which is that start with Project based like starting to incorporate AI with projects or with certain teams within your company could you explain a little bit what you meant with that right so you may recall the the birth of email which was only 25 years ago from a business point of view and a lot of companies said we're gonna just wait till it's figured out and then we'll just bring it into everything we do but the successful company said here's a little tiny division

of seven people let's see what happens when they use email inside the business and the same model is here right go find two or three or four people put them in a team and give them something practical not to study but to do using Ai and then copy from them and copy from them and copy from them that's how your company ended up doing everything else it already does that's the method I mentioned before your blog and I think you've known a lot about that blog I want to ask you just a practical piece of

advice how do you stay so consistent not missing a date not missing a beat and putting out the content and again it's before chat gpts are using just Jeff gbt to post every single day give us a tip as far as managing your time in a productive way making sure that you show up okay so first all my words are my words I have never used chat TPT to write anything of course not in the public but I need to say that the second thing is I made one decision 20 years ago that I was

going to post every day which means that there's going to be a post tomorrow not because I feel like it tomorrow not because I'm ready tomorrow but because I decided 20 years ago that there would be a post Tomorrow there's a lot of benefit to that you decided a long time ago that you were going to show up at work tomorrow so you're going to show up at work tomorrow that cycle is easy to avoid if you're at a buffet That Never Ends right and then just in terms of a tip I don't think I'm

as consistent as I am interesting but what I try to do when I reread every post is say does this sound like me or does this sound like someone else wrote it and then I rewrite it until it sounds like me wow that's very powerful and and actually for the links resources mentioned in this episode check out the show notes at www.pwoof.com podcast where we'll link to Seth's blog and I know that myself I've been following that and also you could see all of I think it's 18 books how many books are we up to

21 bestsellers to anyone okay 21 and actually a couple of them are in my in my top 10 lists when people ask me my books I have a PDF there right there um so thank you for everything you've done for for the world to make the world a better place let's close with the four rapid fire questions are you ready hope so number one a book that changed your life I think I'll pick the art of possibility by Ben Zander and Roz Xander number two a piece of advice you got that you'll never forget don't

look for good advice it's good number three anything you wish could go back and do differently you know I love time travel books I've been reading time travel books for a very long time I would say the best one for a beginner is called replay I've made more mistakes and had more failures than anybody listening to this podcast and every one of them contributed to me being able to be who I am today so if I went back and did one who knows what would happen so no I understand that there's a consequence to my

short-sighted actions there's a consequence to the opportunities I've missed and I try to learn from those consequences but regret doesn't get me very far wow and last and final question what's the only a bucket list to achieve right you can say it slowly it's a rapid fire answer the question can be slow what's still on your bucket list to achieve well here I have been on on your podcast so we're gonna have to cross that one off the list um my bucket list anything anything on the horizon as far as projects I know you've been

involved in other other projects and and others always projects always projects bucket list of items are very interesting because like I've been on the Ted stage a lot of times more than most people I've had really extraordinary events occur in my life and I gotta say sometimes you take a bite of a perfect nectarine or you get a hug from a friend and it's worse more than one of those so I'm not sure I have a bucket list I think what I have is a really lucky collection of moments wow this is so powerful so

thank you so much for joining us I know your time is valuable that is why in the name of our listeners will forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us today it's been a blast thank you really well done I promise my pleasure foreign [Music]