Nate Ritter

Here’s a few excerpts from Godin’s Purple Cow that I wanted to remember for posterity and later use. I have to write them somewhere so I can come back to them later since the book was borrowed from our CEO:

If it’s just like the others, no one will go out of their way to bad-mouth it. Ray’s Pizza is just plain average. You won’t get sick, but you won’t grin with pleasure, either.

Nobody says, “Yeah, I’d like to set myself up for some serious criticism!” And yet. . . the only way to be remarkable is to do just that

Cadillac’s new CTS, in my humble opinion, is perhaps the ugliest car ever produced outside the Soviet bloc. Cadillac has been roundly criticized in car magazines, at dealerships, and on countless online bulletin boards. Guess what? These cars are selling. Fast. It’s a rebirth for a tired brand . . . “

Compare these successes to the Buick. The Buick is a boring car. It’s been boring for almost fifty years. Few people aspire to own a Buick. The Buick isn’t easy to criticize, but it’s also not very successful, is it?

Boring always leads to failure*
(*Except of course, when being boring is, in and of itself, remarkable.)

Compromise is about sanding down the rough edges to gain buy-in from other constituencies. Vanilla is a compromise ice cream flavor, while habanero pecan is not. While there may be just a few people who are unwilling to eat vanilla ice cream, there are legions of people who are allergic to nuts, sensitive to spicy food, or just plain uninterested in eating a challenging scoop of ice cream. The safe compromise choice for a kid’s birthday party is the vanilla. But vanilla is boring. You can’t build a fast-growing company around vanilla.

In almost every market, the boring slot is filled. The product designed to appeal to the largest possible audience already exists, and displacing it is awfully difficult. Difficult because the very innocuousness of the market-leading product is its greatest asset. How can you market yourself as “more bland than the leading brand”? The real growth comes with products that annoy, offend, don’t appeal, area too expensive, too cheap, too heavy, too complicated, too simple - too something. (Of course, they’re too too for some peopel, but just perfect for others.)

And now, on to another borrowed book from the CEO - The Perfect Store by Adam Cohen