The problem with the purple cow

21 years ago, Seth Godin wrote a short (and very popular) book called “Purple Cow“. If you’ve not read it, here is a very quick snippet that explains the premise:

“The world is full of boring stuff—brown cows—which is why so few people pay attention…. A purple cow… now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.”

It’s good advice, but it can be taken to bad places and I think we’re seeing a lot of it with Google. In recent weeks, they’ve unveiled some very impressive “purple cow” ideas, like they do every year. The problem is two-fold:

1. They often bring these new ideas at the expense of more effective but less flashy improvements.
2. Most of these new things just don’t last (or maybe never even come out). For example, in 2017 Google showed an impressive demo of removing a chain link fence from in front of an image, and seven years later it still hasn’t been released.

If you use Google products, you’ve seen the core issues with things like Google My Business (often too difficult to “claim” your own business) or the overcomplexity of Google Analytics 4. It wouldn’t be exciting for Google to announce that they’ve added more staff to help with business profiles, or that Google Analytics was now more streamlined for the average user. Instead, they chase the purple cow at every turn, and then quietly move on once the hype has died down.

I’m not against purple cows, but if you’re bringing them out at the expense of your brown cows, you’re eventually going to end up without any cows at all.