Seth Godin is one of the titans of today’s popmarketing and my metaidol (even honored him with his own category in this Blog). However, he lost some of his thunder today with his post on cereals which made me wonder if I had got Purple Cow all wrong. For those who haven’t read Purple Cow (you really should, by the way) the main theme is that your company should create something remarkable. The point of this (as I interpreted it) is to stay clear of the clutter and me-too products enabling “the idea of your product” to spread frictionfree thru viral networks, hopefully reaching a tipping point à la Gladwell. Intuition says brilliant.
However, in the cereal-post Godin suggests that you can create a remarkable product thru variety and uses an example in which a hotel could use 40 different cereals or 15 different types of bread to differentiate itself, creating a sense of “Wow” (to lend some Tom Peters-lingo) qualifying it to be a remarkable product. In my book, this qualifies as classic “we have the worlds biggest ball of yarn-marketing”. Very American, all in all 
Nothing remarkable, hardly innovative and not a very sustainable competitive advantage.
Sure, it might get people to talk and it might help you break thru the clutter, but I always thought that the point of Ideavirus, Purple Cow, Liars etc. was to stay clear of the clutter, not break thru it. If the idea is to break thru it we might as well all try to find our own variation of tatooing someone’s forehead, buy an overpriced grilled sandwich on ebay etc. But that’s not building something to last (to paraphrase another one of my management-heroes), now is it?
Learning after doing has written a nice post on the practical implications of the Cereal-post, well worth reading.
