Make your Business a ‘Purple Cow’
Posted on July 30, 2013 by Kevin Weir, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
Do you know how to make your business stand out from your competition? Here's a proven way that you can gain more business without discounting.
In Seth Godin’s groundbreaking book Purple Cow, he describes driving down the highway while on vacation in France admiring all the beautiful brown cows dotting the picturesque farm land. However after so many miles and so many brown cows, they all started to blend into the landscape. Seth thought to himself “What would stand here would be a purple cow.” Yes, a purple cow would grab attention like no other cow out in the pasture.
This concept came back to the forefront a few days ago. I was visiting a client’s new location, and admiring their facility. During the discussion with the manager, we had a discussion about one of their major suppliers, and how disappointed they were in their service and quality. She was looking at selecting a new supplier, but almost all of her focus was on what price they could get from the new supplier for the product, even though the new supplier would have many distinct advantages over the old supplier. As I drove away and into the blinding early December snowstorm, it suddenly hit me. Virtually every supplier in this industry is nothing more than a brown cow. They provide a good product at a fair price, and they go through spurts of bad customer service that they have to correct. There is nothing special about any of them, so the only way that my client could differentiate any of them was on price. However, if one of these companies made themselves a Purple Cow, they could dominate the marketplace by delivering their product in such a way that every customer would want to deal with them and them only.
Even just a few years ago, a business could be just another brown cow, and still succeed. However with the current economic conditions, only those businesses who can make themselves into purple cows will be the ones that succeed. So what will you do to make your business a purple cow? One of the best places to start is to find out what your competitors are doing. If you don’t have a good grasp of what they are doing, then how can you come up with a way to make yourself different? Go on-line and do some research, or mystery shop them. The more you know about them, the better you will be prepared to create your own Purple Cow.
