lwsp

Books should be judged by what you remember from them. So, in this series, I’l review a book simply from memory, 2 weeks after reading it!

Coincidentally, this has the added benefit of making the reviews exceptionally short - a big plus for both myself, and the busy people reading these reviews!

I only remember 3 things from “Free Prize Inside: How to Make a Purple Cow” by Seth Godin.

First, purple cows are good. Purple cows are the ‘free prize’ or soft innovation inside a product. These can range from the free prize in a cereal box, to the achievement points inside an Xbox game. These free prizes often become the reason people buy the product and talk about it. Whether you want to call this differentiation, a USP, or a free prize, I think it is important to keep in mind for any product development.

Second, Godin’s argument is that Free Prizes are where the money’s really at. He asserts that paradigm shifting technological innovation is ultimately a money loser due to the large amounts of capital required to make the innovation. On the other end of the spectrum, heavy marketing is also a money loser. Again, it is difficult to make your return here exceed the amount of money you need to spend to be effective. Instead, Godin proposes that we should focus on driving “Soft Innovations”. Innovations that don’t cost a lot of money, but often end up being what the customer buys the product for. According to Godin, companies should take all their ad and hard innovation spend, and use that to create really great products. Basically, he thinks companies should focus on making great products with free prizes/purple cows that encourage their users to talk about them.

Coincidentally, I brought this idea up to an Ad Agency in 2005. They looked at me like I was from Mars, and promptly told me that I needed at least 1 Million to launch any kind of product into the online space. On another note, MJ Sikorsky says (and I’m heavily paraphrasing here ) “If you can make something people want, all that other stuff: marketing, cap table, advisory board, BoD, etc, won’t matter. It can always be fixed. If you can’t make something people want, all that stuff doesn’t matter either.”

Last thing I remember from the book is finding “free prizes” by going to the edges. (There’s an actual name for it, but I can’t remember ) Essentially, pick a criteria, and go to either edge of that criteria. So if you pick customer service, either go to the edge of providing bend-over-backwards customer service, or no customer service (with associated price decrease, of course). There are a lot of interesting examples of this in the book. Again, an easy way to make sure you are differentiating, and not doing things half-a$$ed!

On the whole, this was a great book, and worth the money. Not a lot of Earth shattering concepts here, but definitely a good marketing book for non-marketing people. One of the best things about the book is actually the in-depth end notes, which go into great detail about the notes.