I am currently reading Purple Cow by Seth Godin. This is a great book. It is a very short read (just over 100 pages) that is packed with insight. The gist of the book is that your business needs to rise above the dull and boring and become remarkable. The changing landscape of culture and marketing is that traditional advertising is losing its effectiveness and products that are truly innovative and generate buzz are gaining market share. The battle is to rise above being invisible in our post-consumption society where everybody has everything they need and everybody is saturated with advertisements for more stuff. According to Godin...
The opposite of remarkable is "very good."
Ideas that are remarkable are much more likely to spread than ideas that aren't. Yet so few brave people make remarkable stuff. Why? I think it's because they think that the opposite of "remarkable" is "bad" or "mediocre" or "poorly done". Thus, if they make something very good, they confuse it with being virus-worthy [this is a reference to Godin's previous book Ideavirus]. Yet this is not a discussion about quality at all.
If you travel on an airline and they get you there safely, you don't tell anyone. That's what's supposed to happen. What makes it remarkable is if it's horrible beyond belief or if the service is so unexpected (they were an hour early! they comped my ticket because I was cute! they served flaming crepes suzette in first class!) that you need to share it.
Factories set quality requirements and try to meet them. That's boring. Very good is an everyday occurrence and hardly worth mentioning.
Are you making very good stuff? How fast can you stop?
I want my law firm, Alerding Castor, LLP, to be remarkable. We provide excellence in legal counsel to businesses which are innovators (e.g., software licensing, SaaS, bio-technology...). We approach law from an innovative prospective and partner with clients who are themselves Purple Cows and creating remarkable ventures.
So, according to Godin, are your products or services "remarkable" (i.e., are you a Purple Cow?) or merely "very good"?
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