Viral Marketing for Business: Can a Toilet Be a Purple Cow?

One of the major principles that Seth Godin teaches is that you need to create a "Purple Cow" if you want to have viral marketing success.  He wrote a book by this title about the entire concept, but basically a "Purple Cow" is something remarkable, meaning that you remark about it to others. 

If you are driving down the road and see a cow, your reaction is "oh, a cow".  But if you drove down the street and saw a purple cow... you would say, "WOW!  A purple cow!  Pull over!  Grab the video camera, I'm gonna run out there and check this out, let's put it on YouTube!"  Your job as a marketer is to build purple cows and get people to talk about your purple cows as often as possible.  Got it?

Well, the next response I get from a lot of marketers is "My company builds [insert boring product here].  There is no way I can make that an interesting or remarkable viral marketing video.  I just have to put up a normal brochureware website, do print ads and hope for the best."  My response... WRONG.  It is possible for every single product out there to have something remarkable about it or the people that use it or how they use it.  Someone, someplace, is passionate about using or building the product.  And as a marketer, you need to tap into that passion and make a purple cow out of it.  Even the lowly toilet, usually a quite boring product, can lead to viral marketing success.

Even a Toilet Can be a Purple Cow - 2 Examples

This first example of viral marketing is by a Swedish toilet company that showcases a feature of their toilet that makes it a purple cow.  Thanks to David Meerman Scott for pointing me toward this example from his blog.  (The video is safe for work.)  PS - As of writing, this video is the first result on YouTube when you search for "toilet", and has over 1.9 million views.  How cool is that?

The second example comes from a trip I took to Japan.  It was my first time to Japan, and the hotel had a toilet that I thought was so cool that I actually took out my cell phone and filmed it and photographed it.  Seriously!  If you are used to the boring toilets that are in the rest of the world, this thing is pretty intense.  I never ended up doing anything with my video, but that's OK, since there are a bunch of other videos on YouTube about the shower toilet, which further proves my point that they are remarkable and worthy of a viral marketing campaign.

Here is an example of a video with almost 6,000 views that shows of some of the features of this remarkable toilet.  (The video is safe for work.)

Can you think of example of a "boring" product that became a purple cow?  How did this bit of viral marketing happen?  

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Comments

Posted by Mike Volpe on Tue, Aug 05, 2008 @ 09:03 AM