How Can a Purple Cow Help You Grow Your Business by Authority Positioning? The Art of Authority Podcast Ep 5 | Mike Saunders

Welcome to the Art of Authority podcast, bringing you interviews and episodes to help you radically optimize your authority and influence to become the go to expert in your field. Here's your host, authority positioning coach, Mike Saunders.

Welcome to this next segment of the Art of Authority. Hey, this is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. How can a purple cow help your authority positioning? Have you ever read the book by Seth Godin called Purple Cow? If you've not, you need to stop right now, go over to wherever you buy books and get Purple Cow. It really is just a transformative business book and it talks about being remarkable. So what I would like to do in this episode is talk about this book and how we can apply it to our marketing, our business development as it applies to authority positioning. Because think about something when we can stand out from the crowd. And some of our previous segments here in the Art of Authority, I've talked about competitive advantage and how we need to develop that competitive advantage so that in positioning ourselves, our personal, our business brands, in the minds of our target audience, they think of us a little differently. Well, that kind of is what Purple Cow is about. So in reality, Seth Godin wrote this book and he's really made a career to making statements that provoke people to new ways of thinking. And it's really, really awes. If you have not read his work, you need to read his work. In fact, one of my other favorite books of his is called Meatball Sunday. That's another fun book to read. But in Purple Cow, he was driving through the French countryside on a family vacation and he saw these cows grazing next to the highway, right? And you think about, you know, this nice rolling hills and green grass and cows grazing on the highway, and all of the people in this car just ignored it. It was like, oh, cow, cow. You know? But he says if they had driven by and seen all these cows and one of them was purple, now that would have been interesting and that would have been remarkable, and that would have been worth noticing. And according to Seth Godin, that's exactly what we need to do to build into our products and services if we want to succeed today. Something worth noticing. Have you ever run pay per click ads? Have you ever run Facebook ads? Do they just knock it out of the park every single time, or is it really an art form? It is. I mean, I can tell you right now, I've dabbled a little, which is probably the problem. You know, I need to really get in and figure it out and strategically set up, you know, Facebook campaigns, because I know they work. But think of it like this. How many ads do we see in our Facebook feed each and every day and we just ignore it? You know, and I've heard statistics and research where they say when you go on Google and you see the ads at the top and on the right, people tend to ignore those because they know their ads. So how can we purple cow our business? That's a really, really interesting concept and that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. So when everyone else is done with their marketing tricks and gimmicks and sorry, I'm in marketing. I love marketing. I live and breathe marketing. But there's gimmicks and there's tricks and you can do too much. Now, just like salt. You know, the Bible talks about a little bit of salt is good, but too much, ooh, that's way too much. And that's just like with anything. You know, if you have a flashing this and a pop up that and a deadline and a countdown timer and some of those things in moderation at the right time can work, but you have to be careful. But when we think about something, we need to plug away with tried and true marketing promotion in our business. But remember, it's critical to actually do things that work. But, but even more importantly than that, I would submit to you this, do them consistently, month in and month out. Otherwise you don't really give it a chance for it to work. So once you're noticed because of your marketing and then the social proof because testimonials from happy customers come in, you start getting noticed. So why do we really need to be remarkable? According to Seth Godin, his book Purple Cow, there's three phases of advertising. Before, during and after. So before advertising, there was word of mouth. You know, if you had a product or service that could solve problems for people, they talked about it and then other people bought it too. So that's word of mouth marketing. That's before then during advertising, prosperity was on the rise back in the day and people seem to have an unending desire for more stuff. And then TV and mass media came in to play and all of a sudden now you're speaking to the masses. And if you advertise your product directly to the end, consumer sales would go up. But guess what? That has become so diluted because of all the competition. And our attention spans in and of themselves have been reduced because so many things vie for our attention. That's a really, really big thing to keep in mind. So Godin, Seth Godin notices Something interesting about this approach. The entire purpose was to create a product that appealed to the entire marketplace, right? That was the only way you can make mass advertising work. You needed everybody to buy your product if you were gonna make any kind of a product or profit margin. So if you were to boil down the formula for success in the during advertising phase, it would be this. Create safe, ordinary products and combine them with great marketing. Well, that's kind of an old, outdated approach, isn't it? So here's the new rule for success. Create remarkable products that the right people look for. The right people are our target audience. And as Seth Godin says in his book, when you look at the companies that are creating remarkable products, they have very few things in common. In fact, you take a look at the remarkable products in any single category, they often look like they're opposite. So like Four Seasons of Motel 6. Two hotel chains that couldn't be any more different, right? What they have in common is that they have nothing in common. They're outliers. They are moving toward the edges. They are really positioned at the edges. Motel 6 is super inexpensive and clean. Four Seasons is expensive and has remarkable service. And that brings up problems for people trying to find inspiration in a marketplace for what you need to do. Because the leader in the market is. Is something, someone that is actually doing things that are remarkable. And that's where creativity comes in. In reality, if you think about your widget, your product, your service, whatever you do, man, how can you goose it, amplify it, optimize it, you know, spice it up, whatever you want to call it, how can you do it differently?

So here's. Here's a thought. Ideas that spread win. There's another book by Seth Godin. And I mean, he's just a prolific writer and thought leader, and you really, really need to get his books. But this one I'm thinking of is called the idea virus. And, you know, people get sick, they sneeze, they spread their germs, and someone else gets sick. Well, he's talking about the idea of virus. You know, having an idea that spreads. You know, like today we would call it viral marketing. So people help you spread your ideas. They're the early adopters, right? And I think that that's what we need to. We need to focus on something where someone is noticing a product or service, yours. That's remarkable. And then you have to be so remarkable that they can't help but to spread it around. So you have to focus on the people. You have to find the right People to spread the word because that is what's critical to, to your success. You need to focus on the people. And guess what? Everyone's favorite radio station is wiifm. What's in it for me? And you need to focus on the target audience, your consumer, them, what benefits they will receive when they get your product or service, not all the whiz bang shiny object features and how it will help you. So I think that's something that we, we could probably spend about four segments on. But suffice it to. You need to differentiate yourself and you need to differentiate your customers. That's called segmenting. And so you need to find the ones kind of like the 80, 20 rule. You need to find the ones that the 20%, they're going to give you 80% of the, you know, impact. Find those influencers, find those lynch pins. As.

I'm in Seth Godin mode, it's another one of his books, lynchpin. You need to get that one as well. The problem with Purple Cow is that doing it to old ways feels safe. So we like to be safe, right? But there's a universal law that those who stand out get criticized. Okay? So you might be thinking, oh well, if I step out of that line and get noticed, then I'm going to have eggs or tomatoes thrown at me or I'm going to get criticized or that opens me up for other people's opinions. Well, guess what? We have to take that risk. We have to get out there and promote our product or service in a very unique way so that we're noticed, so that we're remarkable. And guess what? Let's wrap it right back around to authority positioning. That's who people think of as an expert status, right? So now you get into the mode of how you present your product or service so that it's remarkable and you really bring it into the realm of being that educator and advocate for the success of your target audience. So these are some really, really important things to keep in mind. And here's a conclusion to wrap this whole thought process up. The time for you to be a purple cow has come. It's now. It's no longer a decision you get to make because it's the only path to success. We have to stand out. We have to make sure that we have our product or service on the forefront of people's minds and for the right reasons. We don't want to be that goofball. Let me show you this online video from this, this nut job, right? We want to be thought of as that authority and expert. So that, that teaching, that mindset, that authoritative mindset with good content and good information. If you also want to take a look at something, I put this on my blog, on my website, authority positioning coach.com but you can just go, go. Now Seth Godin put out a really neat PDF called 99 Cows. So if you just Google 99 Cows and Seth Godin, you'll find this. It's free online, but it's got a big picture of a duck on the COVID and it's really an interesting collection of case studies and it details how a lot of different companies became remarkable. So it's something that might give you some neat ideas. And when you can keep this in mind of making your business stand out with the right perspective now that's going to give give you that 30,000 foot view blue Ocean marketing strategy and get you out of the weeds of tactics that all these other people are talking about. That might work for some, but let your competitors go run this and that campaign. I'm not even going to mention you know the types of tactics because you might be running them and there's nothing wrong with that. But when you can elevate yourself to being that expert in authority and influencer yourself because of how you present your content that you're good at, you then are going to attract people to you. Because remember, building your authority is your number one priority. So until next time, make it a great day.

You've been listening to the Art of Authority podcast. Are you interested in building your authority positioning as the number one strategy to grow your business, brand and influence? Book your authority audit today. The seven point audit of your current authority position will uncover opportunities and show you how to be seen as a leading expert and authority your industry looks to. For advice, visit www.awarenesspositioningcoach.com.