Seth Godin’s Purple Cow Principle: Why Being Remarkable Beats Being Better
Most marketers have it completely wrong. They think marketing is about hustling harder, spending more on ads, or copying
Most marketers have it completely wrong. They think marketing is about hustling harder, spending more on ads, or copying what successful competitors are doing. According to marketing legend Seth Godin, this approach is not just ineffective, it’s the reason most businesses remain invisible.
The bestselling author and marketing contrarian has a radically different view: stop trying to be better and start being remarkable. His Purple Cow theory—which he developed and popularised—has quietly revolutionised how the world’s most successful companies think about growth.
What Marketing Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Seth Godin cuts through decades of marketing mythology with brutal clarity: “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.”
Even more surprising, he argues that traditional advertising-based marketing is dead: “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.”
So what is marketing in the modern era? Godin’s definition is elegantly simple: “Marketing is telling a true story that resonates with your smallest viable audience that they want to hear that causes them to take action and to tell their friends.”
This isn’t marketing as interruption. It’s marketing as invitation.
Seth Godin Purple Cow Theory: Why Remarkable Wins
Seth Godin’s Purple Cow theory sounds almost absurdly simple: “A purple cow is purple because it’s remarkable worth talking about worth making a remark about. Average products are not remarkable but remarkable products people choose to talk about it.”
But here’s where most entrepreneurs misunderstand Godin’s Purple Cow theory. “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.”
The test is brutally honest: “If they think it’s remarkable if they make a remark then it’s remarkable if you think it is who cares.”
How Billion-Dollar Companies Actually Grow
Godin destroys the myth that businesses grow through traditional marketing channels. Consider the companies that have dominated the last 15 years: “If we think about the brands that have been built in the last 10 or 15 years whether it’s things like Google or Discord or Facebook or ChatGPT or we’re thinking about things like Supreme the t-shirt company… how many ads have you seen for Supreme? Zero.”
So how did Supreme reach hundreds of millions in revenue without advertising? “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.”
This pattern repeats across industries. 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 it? Because people whose lives were changed by it generously bring other people along.”
The Product Is the Marketing
Here’s where Godin’s thinking becomes revolutionary for startups. Most founders separate product development from marketing. Godin argues they’re the same thing.
“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.”
Even buying clothes illustrates this principle: “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.”
BMW exemplifies this approach perfectly. “BMW puts the marketing money the advertising money into the car itself. The act of making the BMW is the act of marketing the BMW.”
Permission-Based Marketing: The Antidote to Spam
Godin pioneered permission marketing long before GDPR made it legally necessary. The principle is simple: “You’re only in their inbox because they want you there and the reason they want you there is they heard about it from somebody else.”
The process works organically: “Someone hears about what you’re doing… 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.”
This creates something traditional marketing can’t: genuine anticipation. “You’re creating an environment where someone wants to hear from you tomorrow who would miss you if you were gone.”
Seth Godin’s Fashion Industry Insight
Seth Godin reveals how the fashion industry has mastered his Purple Cow theory: “What people in the fashion industry do Tommy Hilfiger Georgio Armani what they do is they take something that’s already good enough and they change it just enough that people want to talk about it. That’s fashion.”
Fashion isn’t about necessity: “Fashion isn’t giving me an article of clothing that I need. All the articles of clothing that I will ever need have already been manufactured… Fashion is the act of changing it.”
The lesson for entrepreneurs? Small, thoughtful changes that give people something to discuss can be more powerful than revolutionary innovations.
The Brutal Truth About Your Business
Godin forces entrepreneurs to confront an uncomfortable reality: “No one cares about your business and you can’t make them. What people care about is themselves and in caring about yourself you want to talk about ideas you want to talk about products or songs or politicians or musicians or resorts… but you’re only going to talk about the ones that are fun to talk about.”
The acid test for any business is devastatingly simple: “If we stopped advertising to people would they complain? Would people say wait a minute where is your weekly newsletter I miss it?”
Most businesses fail this test spectacularly.
Why Remarkable Things Are Hated
Here’s perhaps Godin’s most counterintuitive insight: “They don’t set out to make something so remarkable that most people hate it but the fact is remarkable things are hated by some and adored and loved by others.”
This explains why most entrepreneurs never achieve remarkable status. They’re terrified of alienating anyone, so they create products that offend no one and excite no one.
But remarkable products are polarising by definition. They have passionate advocates precisely because they also have vocal detractors.
The Internet as Radio for Ideas
Godin understands something most marketers miss about the digital age: “What the internet is is radio for ideas. The same way that music would have been dead without FM radio without DJs playing The Beatles… ideas are now supercharged by the internet. Now an idea can show up in one corner of the internet and the next thing you know it’s everywhere.”
This amplification effect means remarkable products can achieve global scale faster than ever before. But it also means unremarkable products get lost in the noise more completely than ever.
Modern Applications of Seth Godin Purple Cow Thinking
The transcripts include a perfect real-world example of Seth Godin Purple Cow marketing in action. A struggling hiking website transformed its fortunes by creating “shipwreck hunt hikes” instead of ordinary hiking trips.
The results were immediate and dramatic: what had been attracting 10 people suddenly drew nearly 200. The concept got picked up by local papers, blogs, and event websites—all without paid promotion.
The lesson? Even in the most ordinary industries, a creative twist can create something worth talking about.
Building Your Seth Godin Purple Cow
The question every entrepreneur must answer: how much of what you do is actually worth talking about? Not what you think is worth discussing, but what actually generates conversation.
Start with Seth Godin’s fundamental insight: people don’t share products or services—they share stories. Your job isn’t to build a better mousetrap; it’s to build a mousetrap so remarkable that people can’t help but tell others about it.
Seth Godin Purple Cow thinking isn’t about being weird for the sake of being different. It’s about understanding that in a world of infinite choice and limited attention, being remarkable isn’t just an advantage—it’s the only sustainable strategy.
As Godin puts it, you need something so interesting that people naturally want to make a remark about it. Because if they’re not remarking about it, by definition, it’s not remarkable.
