Your Product Isn’t That Special. Why Product Often Isn’t Enough to Move Sales.

Earlier this year I embarked on a personal challenge: could I read 52 books in a year? 

When I was a teen and had an abundance of time at my disposal, I was a voracious reader. I devoured books ranging from Dune to Getting Things Done by David Allen. If it was recommended to me on a podcast, I’d read it. Period. It didn’t matter if there was little practical value to me. As a teenager working as a salesperson for Hewlett-Packard, there was little actual need to embrace a cumbersome system like what was proposed by GTD.

All of that changed in my 20s. 

At 23 I launched my first Digital Marketing Agency, Sinfonia Marketing, with a focus on bringing organic social media marketing to the rural French market. We helped evangelize the concept in a part of Europe that was suspicious of anything digital (and American but that’s another story!)

As you can imagine, the stresses of running an agency dramatically cut down on my book reading.

So I resolved to get back on track. I’d commit to reading 52 books a year and, if I managed to make it work, I’d make it a permanent goal in my life.

As I read dozens of books on marketing and advertising, I came across an interesting trend: the idea that marketing should be baked into a product. I discovered the ‘Purple Cow’ idea.

The Purple Cow Isn’t Enough in 2023.

I had long intuited that marketing should be brought into the inception of the product lifecycle. Indeed, the idea was popularized by Seth Godin in Purple Cow,  a book that was already 10 years old by the time I became a marketer. 

Godin, in an amusing anecdote, says that he was driving through rural France and kept seeing brown cows. At first, brown cows were interesting enough on their own, but over time they blended into the scenery. As he drove through the countryside he imagined that a purple cow would be a welcome distraction from the cows he had grown so accustomed to seeing.

He then goes on to make the connection between the brown cows and businesses which are unremarkable. The purple cow, he argues, represents what your product should aspire to be: a product or service that stands apart from the pack.

The ideas presented in Purple Cow have become so mainstream now two decades after publishing, it’s possible to just pick them up by osmosis. Any successful company launching in the 2020s should, by now, realize that you need to try to make a remarkable product in order to have any hope of disrupting a market – or even capturing second place.

But just like everyone back in the late-2000s was trying to be unique by wearing thick-rimmed glasses, flannel shirts, skinny jeans, ironic ugly sweaters, and vintage sneakers, so too has just about every startup adopted the ‘Purple Cow’ approach. And when everyone tries to be a Purple Cow, that Purple Cow is just as invisible as the Brown Cows it tried to replace.

We Now Need Rainbow Cows, Luminous Cows, Shadow Cows, Goat-Cow Hybrids, Cows Made of Slime, and More.

I was recently asked by a Web Experience designer to provide examples of websites I liked. I sent her an example of Joshua Topolsky’s work: The Outline. 

Even three years after it went defunct, The Outline is one of the weirdest sites I’ve ever used. The ideas presented in The Outline were revolutionary. The ad model it pioneered dared to question what has widely been adopted by news outlets online by presenting the question to advertisers directly: “Wouldn’t you pay us more for custom ads aimed at a highly targeted, affluent niche?”

If The Outline were a cow it’d be a pink-and-white cow with tentacles and emojis and news blurbs that naturally form and disappear on its hide. It’d be extremely weird. 

And remarkable, right? What I’m trying to get at is that it’s not remarkable to be a purple cow when everyone is trying to do that. It’s not remarkable to use corporate art and clean design. It’s not remarkable to try to use Material design, Neumorphic design, or whatever some other Fortune 500 company is presenting as ‘good design’.

But is a Remarkable Product Even Enough?

But even if you were to build a Weird Cow, is it even enough in 2023? 

I don’t think it is. If your product was weird, forward-thinking, and remarkable, it’d still be hard to stand out in this day and age. 

There’s too much noise. Media is too fragmented. Society itself is too fragmented and, thus, the market is too fragmented as well. 

Product Marketing is just but one tool in your marketer’s arsenal to deploy. So is branding and, by extension, design. The lesson for 2023 is that you need to be a Weird Cow and also embrace advertising, content marketing, SEO, or whatever else you need to embrace to get the word out. 

Only by adopting a holistic approach and refusing to discard any opportunity or channel can you hope to accomplish your goals. While prioritization of which channels you should focus on initially and which you should dedicate more time to will depend on your own skillset, budget, values, and resources, you will eventually need to move towards activating every channel and try to direct them toward the task of increasing awareness, trust, and, ultimately, conversions.

Is My Product a ‘Weird Cow’?

After reading all of that you might be asking yourself that very question. The truth is that you should know it just by looking at your materials and process. What were you inspired by? Are you truly aiming to be different or ‘different enough’? The nuance between the two is key to knowing whether you are a Weird Cow or Purple Cow.

If you’ve tried to become a ‘Weird Cow’ and are wondering if you went far enough, I’ve put together a downloadable PDF with a self-scoring quiz that should help you analyze if you’ve embraced the Weird Cow ethos completely or not along with tips on how to get Weirder. 

To download, just enter your email address below. Once you have, you’ll get the PDF sent straight to your inbox.