eConsultant Personal MBA Book Reviews

Purple Cow by Seth Godin

Summary

Seth Godin makes a convincing case that in this world of exploding choices of producs and decreasing consumer attention span the only way to survive is to make the product so remarkable that the consumer is sold right from the first experience.
- The standard Ps of marketing : Product, Pricing, Promotion, Positioning, Publicity, Packaging, Pass-along, Permission. Most marketing involved doing a combination of these Ps for a given product.
- The TV-Industrial complex cycle - creating a product, buying TV ads, getting more distribution, selling more products, and using profits to create more products - is dying.
- The only solution to survice is to create a Purple Cow product.
Tips to make remarkable (=Purple Cow) products:

- Experiment with inviting users to change thier behavior and reward them with dramatically better results.
- If a current product can't be improved to to become a remarkable product, take the profits and invest in building something new.
- Remarkable products will succeed only if there are early adopters who sneeze - read Unleashing the Ideavirus. All components of the idea virus must be in place.
- Thus, advertising must be targetted to interested sneezers with influence. (See : The Influentials by Jon Berry and Ed Keller)
- To target the sneezers with influence, you have to differentiate your customers into the most profitable group, the most likely to sneeze group, and the rest. Develop/advertise/reward the first two groups and ingnore the rest.
- The reason why there are so few Purple Cows is that companies want to play it safe. But boring is unsfe in the long run.
- The opposite of remarkable is "very good". (Good to Great : The opposite of great is good.) Stop making "very good" products ASAP.
- Service your top 20% customers.
- Make a collectible version of your product.
- There is no single step-by-step formula for creating a Purple Cow.

Personal MBA Project

01. Mastery by George Leonard
02. Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton
03. Getting Things Done by David Allen
04. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
05. What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan
06. Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business by Ram Charan
07. On Competition by Michael Porter
08. Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne
09. Seeing What's Next by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, Scott D. Anthony
10. The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker
11. First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman
12. The One Thing You Need to Know by Marcus Buckingham
13. The Essays of Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett & Lawrence Cunningham
14. Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger
15. The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Finance for Nonfinancial Managers by Robert A. Cooke
16. Essentials of Accounting by Robert Newton Anthony and Leslie K. Pearlman
17. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt & Jeff Cox
18. Lean Thinking by James Womack & Daniel Jones
19. The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel
20. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
21. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
22. The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula & Richard Tong
23. Purple Cow by Seth Godin
24. Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin
25. The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
26. The Bootstrapper's Bible by Seth Godin
27. Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
28. On Writing Well by William Zinsser
29. How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
30. Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
31. The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer
32. Flawless Consulting by Peter Block
33. Real Estate Principles for the New Economy by Norman Miller & David Geltner
34. Getting To Yes by Fisher, Ury, and Patton
35. Principles of Statistics by M.G. Bulmer
36. A Primer on Business Ethics by Tibor Machan & James Chesher
37. Brand New by Nancy F. Koehn
38. American Business, 1920-2000 by Thomas K. McCraw, John H. Franklin, and A. S. Eisenstadt
39. The Little Book of Business Wisdom by Peter Krass (Editor)
40. Re-imagine by Tom Peters
41. The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun
42. The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch

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Book Reviews Index :

100 Simple Secrets of Happy People by David Niven | 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People by David Niven | 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself by Steve Chandler | Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy | Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | Focal Point by Brian Tracy | Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen | Gig by John Bowe | It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden | It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy by Michael Abrashoff | Keep Your Brain Alive by by Lawrence C Katz & Manning Rubin | Learned Optimism by Dr Martin E P Seligman | Life Strategies by Phil McGraw | Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fullfillment by George Leonard | Never Wrestle with a Pig by Mark H McCormack | Please Don't Just Do What I Tell You by Bob Nelson | Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki | The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management by Hyrum Smith | The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success by Brian Tracy | The Brand You 50 by Tom Peters | The Power of Optimism by Alan Loy McGinnis | The Professional Service Firm 50 by Tom Peters | The Project 50 by Tom Peters | The War of Art by Steven Pressfield | The Wisdom of Teams by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith | Thriving in 24/7 by Sally Helgesen | Time Tactics of Very Successful People by B. Eugene Griessman | Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation by Robert I. Sutton