Painting the Cow

The title is a reference to Seth Godin's book Purple Cow. The nutshell of the book is that to succeed, you need to be remarkable. Nobody really even notices cows...but if there were a PURPLE cow - now THAT people would notice.

But what if your cow is just a plain brown-and-white cow? Then what? Well, I'm trying to figure out how to get a bucket of purple paint and Paint My Cow.

Right now, I'm working with a pretty successful cow. This cow is regularly making money - has some left over at the end of the year...even THIS year. I'm not sure the cow is of the cash variety, but it certainly has the potential. Thing is, this cow is really just your run-of-the-mill brown-and-white cow.

So how do we go about painting this cow? How do we transform the business from ordinary to remarkable?

You need to open your eyes. Look at what the competition is, and isn't, doing. Talk to your target customers. Find out what they want, and then figure out how to give it to them in a remarkable way. For me right now that means getting into the mind of the interior designer and finding out what really motivates them. Brands? Profit opportunity? Simplicity? Selection? The answer is that it is probably a mix of all of these things.

So I have two things to do:

First, solicit input from a cross section of interior designers. Email inquiries work. Buying them lunch works better. Once I get some momentum, then I try to get 6 or 7 of them in a room together to try and build some energy around what works for them.

The second thing that I have to do is to work on ways to give them what they are asking for in a way that they will think of ME before they think of someone else. But I can't do the second part until I do the first. I might develop a GREAT white-glove delivery service, but if what they care about is profit opportunity, then the white-glove service actually works AGAINST the goal (after all, they know that ultimately they are paying for the added service).

In my mind, the most important thing (to get back to the cow analogy) is to research what color your customer likes, and then paint your cow. Then, once you have painted your cow, don't paint it again. If the color of the cow keeps changing, your customer won't know what they are buying.

Take the time. Do the research. Pick out the color and paint that cow. With a little work, you can be remarkable.