In his book, Seth Godin - the new marketing guru - talks demonstrates a simple concept: In order to win in todays over advertised, over consumed marketplace, where people just don’t trust marketing anymore, your product has to be ‘remarkable’, literally: It has to be so remarkable, that if people see it, they remark about it. ‘Imagine you’re driving down the road’, he tells us. If you see a regular brown, or white or black cow, you probably won’t be very excited. Its even less likely that you’ll tell your fellow passengers about it. Now imagine, all of a sudden you see a purple cow. You’re probably going to shout out ‘Wow! A Purple cow!’ You’re probably then going to pull out your camera, take a dozen pictures about it and mail it to all your friends - naturally spreading the word of mouth.

In order to be remarkable, Godin (rightly) tells us - you have to take risks, you have to push the boundaries. He believes, however, that its riskier not to take risks, than it is to take risks. If you make yet another plain vanilla offering, trying to please everybody, then you’re probably going to end up with a highly compromised, highly boring product - which nobody is going to end up really liking, anyway.

It also helps to rethink how you spend your money on marketing and product development: If you go and produce a generic product, for say Rs. 10 lakh, and then market the hell out of it, spending say, Rs. 50 lakh, in an over crowded marketplace, chances are, that you still might not make it. On the other hand, if you spent that Rs. 40 lakh in making your product remarkable, or otherwise launching 4 other remarkable products, you are much more likely to get a massively successfuly product that due to its remarkable properties, markets itself.

So how do you make a remarkable product? Alas - if there was a formula, then people would always produce remarkable products (and then these products would no longer be remarkable - so the formula would cease to exist). There is, however a process - look at the traditional ‘Ps’ of marketing - Price, Product, Promotion, Placement, Position, Permission, and with each of them, see if you can test the boundaries. Can you drive a fundamental (not incremental, because your competitors will just match you) shift in pricing? Can you redesign your product so that its fundamentally, remarkably easier to use, more beautiful to look at, and more long lasting? Can you change the way that your sales staff talk to your customers?

While Godin’s book itself probably doesn’t tell you something you don’t know - it serves the purpose of reminding you of the importance of the importance of doing things truly differently in order to beat the competition. With its numerous examples, it also illustrates how other companies built sustainable businesses by doing something remarkable, not once, but over and over (after a while, what’s remarkable, becomes commonplace, therefore you have to do it all over again to keep surviving).

Relevance to India? I feel that since India is not as sophisticated a market, and Indian customers aren’t in the same over consumed state as their US counterparts, the lessons in this book still apply. If anything, given a less mature market, its probably slightly easier to be remarkable here…

Tags: Book Review, marketing Startup Essentials, Purple cow, Seth Godin, Startups

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