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The Calorie-free Purple Cow

Update: I originally wrote a much longer post, but cut a lot of it to make it more internet friendly. I unfortunately cut the part where I talked about how striking it was that only a small part of this conference was to straight marketing tricks, while a lot of it was nuts and bolts marketing that any agent really needs to succeed. What stood out is that The Purple Cow conversation was under an hour of the entire day, when it is often the substantial part of entire other conferences. I apologize if I made this sound like Ben was preaching all fluff: Ben is very much the anti-traditional real estate speaker, with a captivating, understated speaking style and real, useful tactics to help agents become better at their jobs.

Last Thursday I was a fish out of water on a Rain Camp panel hosted by Ben Kinney in Bellingham.

I left feeling exhausted and depressed. The afternoon was largely devoted to consumer-negative or neutral tactics for getting clients. Ben’s recommendations largely hinged on Seth Godin’s purple cow theory. In short, the popular understanding of the theory says that when you drive by pastures, you never remember individual cows, but if there were a purple cow in the pasture, you would not only remember it, but you would talk about it for the rest of your life. Specific purple cow marketing recommendations ranged from neon pink business cards (which reminded me of this guy) to wearing flip flops all the time. In short: be weird in your marketing.

This is not what Purple Cow marketing is supposed to be – it’s supposed to be about how you create a unique product (i.e. an unusually useful online home search product), not your marketing.

The original concept of making unusual products is good, but the Purple Cow is frankly a crappy allegory that is usually misinterpreted. Ultimately a purple cow is merely a trick. Purple cows aren’t useful and they (presumably) produce the same milk or hamburgers that black-and-white cows produce.

At the few-and-far-between real estate conferences I attend, the people on stage uniformly preach the shallowest Purple Cow interpretation possible: you must stand out physically and build a brand around being different in a functionally useless way. Do anything to be memorable as long as it doesn’t involve talking about what you actually do.

Purple Cow marketing is win-lose or win-neutral for consumers. Purple cow marketing does not help people buy the right home, avoid over-paying, get the offer in on time, or correctly answer the hundreds of questions consumers have about buying a home. This sort of gimmicky marketing is something capitalism is supposed to minimize: it is an unproductive waste of resources. It’s win-lose or win-neutral for consumers: there is nothing about their home buying experience it improves and it often obfuscates actual quality of service. Consumers would be much better off if agents spent their time and energy working on behalf of their clients.

Imagine what the real estate industry would be like if agents and brokers took half of time and money they devote to marketing – including the lectures and clubs – and spent that time and effort improving their actual service: knowing every nook and cranny of the inventory (on and off market), knowing home pricing, bringing in the best staging and photography pros for their clients, and being highly responsive.

My other beef with Purple Cow marketing is personal: as a consumer, it turns me off. Sales people who employ tricks make me feel gross. Here’s why: sales tricks indicate two things:

  1. You don’t believe your knowledge or skills are better in any way than your competition, so you have to resort to tricks to get clients.
  2. You don’t believe your knowledge or skills can be differentiated in any meaningful way, so you aren’t investing in them.

The original promise of the internet was to create a landscape where quality bubbled up. Free information was supposed to render marketing tricks useless. And it has lived up to the promise in many industries, but in the real estate industry the internet has actually  rewarded fluff over substance and has actually undermined the historical importance of quality service and personal referrals for finding real estate agents. It’s a trend that we aim to reverse, starting by putting with our current search product which contains as much MLS data as we are allowed to show, all for free with no registration.

  • http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?p=12128 BloodhoundBlog.com | Calorie-free Purple Cows | National real estate marketing and technology blog | Realtors and real estate, mortgage and investment news

    [...] posted a preview of the underlying theme for the talk on the Estately Blog. In an industry where service should be king, the industry’s focus on a shallow interpretation of [...]

  • steve

    good post Galen, I've been looking at lots of housing Geo sites but Estately does stand out because of your technological prowess. I humbly believe that adding increasingly consumer friendly location based technology is the right path but i'm not even close to being an expert in the field. something like predictive pricing or even more exciting as you mention, a kind of flickr for showing off real estate. That sure is exciting as interior photos is how we determined how good a house was online and its rare to get high quality there. We need Estately in Canada!

  • geordieromer

    Great post Galen. I don't seem to see many CPAs or Attorneys who are known for being “The Hat Lady” or the lady with the French Poodle or the PT Cruiser painted like a Re-Max balloon. Yet we see it all the time in real estate and we see “coaches” preaching more of the same.

    I'd love to see part II of this post. What kinds of things should a real estate professional be doing to be the Purple Cow and REALLY stand out from the herd.
    How does an agent market the fact that they do spend more time really studying the market and working on behalf of their clients?

  • http://LiveLakeForest.com VickiLloyd

    It's actually very difficult to show how you stand out from other agents, because so many consumers don't recognize the difference! If you are able to anticipate and solve problems before they become an issue, the consumer never even knows that it could have become an issue, and assumes that everybody would have/could have completed the sale equally well.

    Too often the consumers only find out that they got a less-than-incredible agent when their house fails to sell. Many mediocre agents stumble through a sale and leave their buyers or sellers fairly happy, and they rarely realize that their home sold for substantially less than it should have, or (for buyers) that they paid more than a good negotiator could have helped them buy it for.

    It's hard to be purple in real estate!

  • http://davidrivers.name/ David Rivers

    Thanks for the informative description of the Purple Cow School, and the hilarious YouTube link!

  • http://game-camera.com Michaelmagnelli

    Nice post , Thanks for sharing

  • Jimw

    Good post Galen, The best “gimmicks” an agent can use to get noticed and increase business is a high level of professionalism, up to date product knowledge, Timely Communication and Accountability.

    The more things change, the more they stay the same. Spend less time on 'marketing' and more time on meaningful relationships that result in referrals and your business will flourish in any market.

  • http://www.datadoctor.biz Kandi

    Hi Galen…. do you know there are 141 calories, Fat 0.47g, Carbs 27.19g , Protein 8.43g in 1 serving of Purple Cow Smoothie and if u wanna see this in percentage it ill belike 3% fat, 74% carbs, 23% protein. So Purple Cow is no different form black-and-white cows in my opinion.

    Thanks.

  • xubeibei

    hello

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  • http://www.pharmahomes.com Jennifer Martin

    The Calorie-free Purple Cow a nice article.

  • http://twitter.com/jasonfortuny Jason Fortuny

    Ok, now hang on a second.

    You’ll get no argument from me that “purple cow” needs to go away. But let’s think about why it’s here in the first place: as much as we don’t like it, it unfortunately works. Otherwise, it would have died off long ago.

    Why does it work? I’ll give you my personal example from 1997 to 1999, which is hardly scientific, but reasonably illustrates my point: I worked for a company that was an order of magnitude ahead of the competition, feature for feature, plus bombshells for features that blew the competition out of the water. Yet when we talked about what we actually do, we couldn’t get any traction in the market. Nobody listened.

    We tried traditional purple cows with zany ad campaigns. Some of them worked modestly. It was enough to get us on the edge of the radar. But when we went back to talking about our features and performance, our market progress evaporated.

    Our mistake was assuming that if the general population understood our features, that they would make the logical conclusion that we were the best product and they would start using us.

    But that’s not what our customers were looking for. It’s truly idiotic, but they wanted to do business the “most established” and “brand recognized” businesses in the market, because they mistakenly believed that if you were the biggest and most well known, then you must be the best. Right? Right.

    So, despite the fact that we had an arsenal of amazing features and prices, our Achilles heel was not looking big enough? Ooookay. So we changed our marketing methods to be a little more suit & tie, and we built an ad campaign to put 16 page ads in the top industry magazines, twenty different banner ads on every ad network, and an aggressive sales cold call rush. If our campaign was a purple cow, it was a purple cow approximately 50 feet high, mooing at 194dB.

    And it worked. I hate the fact that it worked, but it did. We had to market to what our audience responded to, and they responded to BIGNESS. It wasn’t until after they had our product in front of them that they went, “OH WOW LOOK AT ALL THESE FEATURES AND GREAT SERVICE YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING I DIDNT KNOW IT COULD GET THIS GOOD!” We were suddenly perceived as dominant in the industry, we had all the killer features to back up our bravado, and then we were finally a tier 1 player.

    So, yeah, we played the best purple cow we could. What else could we have done?

    Now when I became a freelance consultant, no iteration of the purple cow worked for me. I survived solely on word of mouth of my performance. Even then, it was a struggle to convince clients that, yes, a one-man operation can outperform all those boutique consulting firms out there. I always needed a friend of a prospect to say, “yeah, he’s that good.” Even then, several prospects just wouldn’t bite. Perception ended up being more powerful than reality.

    Now, let’s switch back to real estate. Take Craig Gaudry in Kirkland, for example. Mr. “Success Guaranteed.” By every rumor and anecdote I’ve heard inside the industry, Craig is a cheat and a bastard and screws over buyers and sellers while laughing all the way to the bank. How does he do it? Apaprently, Craig’s success comes from being able to purple cow naive buyers. He puts up the best face and counts on customers not researching the market or listening to word of mouth. He plays on the same perception that “biggest = best.” And since there are a lot of these customers, Craig makes a boatload. Does he get repeat business? Probably not a lot. But there are enough suckers in town to keep feeding him.

    I would love it if customers actually cared about quality, service, and value the way I do. I wish they would realize that biggest doesn’t equal best. I wish people knew how to recognize the best when they see it. But unless the whole world suddenly becomes Ayn Rand fans, it’s probably not going to happen.

    That’s not to say that there is no place for feature marketing. I love technology blogs like Ars because I know when they post about a subject, more often than not, the topic goes through reasonable critical examination, and allows me to examine the facts for myself as well. It’s a good place for me to consider the information and make up my own mind. How many people are like me? Not enough, I suspect.

    For now, I think the purple cow has a limited and strict place in the landscape of marketing.

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