Stop advertising and start innovating.

Not Enough Ps

Marketers for years have talked about the five Ps of mar-keting. (There are more than five of them, but everyone has their favorite five.) Some of them include:

• Product

• Pricing

• Promotion

• Positioning

• Publicity

• Packaging

• Pass-along

• Permission

This is the marketing checklist: a quick way to make sure you’ve done your job, a way to describe how you’re going to go about getting people to buy what the factory just made. If the elements are out of whack with each other (for example, puréed meals that you market to senior cit-izens but taste like baby food), then the marketing message is blurred and ultimately ineffective.

Marketing isn’t guaranteed to work, but the way things used to be, if you got all your Ps right, you were more like-ly than not to succeed.

Something disturbing has happened, though. The Ps just aren’t enough. This is a book about a new P, a P that is suddenly exceptionally important.

The New P

The new P is “Purple Cow.”

When my family and I were driving through France a few years ago, we were enchanted by the hundreds of storybook cows grazing on picturesque pastures right next to the highway. For dozens of kilometers, we all gazed out the window, marveling about how beautiful everything was.

Then, within twenty minutes, we started ignoring the cows. The new cows were just like the old cows, and what once was amazing was now common. Worse than common. It was boring.

Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they’re still boring.

A Purple Cow, though. Now that would be interesting. (For a while.)

The essence of the Purple Cow is that it must be remarkable. In fact, if “remarkable” started with a P, I could probably dispense with the cow subterfuge, but what can you do?

This book is about the why, the what, and the how of remarkable.

Boldfaced Words and Gutsy Assertions

Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. It’s a Purple Cow. Boring stuff is invisible. It’s a brown cow.

Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, it’s invisible.

The TV-industrial complex was the symbiotic relation-ship between consumer demand, TV advertising, and ever-growing companies that were built around invest-ments in ever-increasing marketing expenditures.

The post-consumption consumer is out of things to buy. We have what we need, we want very little, and we’re too busy to spend a lot of time researching something you’ve worked hard to create for us.

The marketing department takes a nearly finished product or service and spends money to communicate its special benefits to a target audience. This approach no longer works.

I believe we’ve now reached the point where we can no longer market directly to the masses. We’ve created a world where most products are invisible. Over the past two decades, smart business writers have pointed out that the dynamic of marketing is changing. Marketers have read and talked about those ideas, and even used some of them, but have maintained the essence of their old marketing strategies. The traditional approaches are now obsolete, though. One hundred years of marketing thought are gone. Alternative approaches aren’t a novelty–they are all we’ve got left.

This is a book about why you need to put a Purple Cow into everything you build, why TV and mass media are no longer your secret weapons, and why the profession of marketing has been changed forever.

Stop advertising and start innovating.

Before, During, and After

Before Advertising, there was word of mouth. Products and services that could solve a problem got talked about and eventually got purchased.

The best vegetable seller at the market had a reputation, and her booth was always crowded.

During Advertising, the combination of increasing prosper-ity, seemingly endless consumer desire, and the power of television and mass media led to a magic formula: If you advertised directly to the consumer (every consumer), sales would go up.

A partnership with the right ad agency and the right banker meant you could drive a company to be almost as big as you could imagine.

After Advertising, we’re almost back where we started. But instead of products succeeding by slow and awkward word of mouth, the power of our new networks allows remark-able ideas to diffuse through segments of the population at rocket speed.

As marketers, we know the old stuff isn’t working. And we know why: because as consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.