Milk your purple cow

Be remarkable

Purple cow refers to a new way to do business- make you different from the rest competitors. Give people a reason to talk about you. The best marketing is not indoctrinated anymore. You need to create ideavirus, let people interested about you and willing to spend time to notice you. Thus, you don’t need to spend time and money to tell people you have a cow. Instead, you should let people know you have a purple cow which can produce unique milk! Blue Nile has some remarkable services and products which can give customers special benefit: 30 days risk-free returnable policy, designed your own unique engagement ring and top 1% Blue Nile signature diamond etc. I think Blue Nile should emphasis on one advantage at each time and create remarkable ideavirus related to that advantage. I will easy for people to remember what BN good at.

Find the sneezers

It’s useless to advertise your product to the people who are not your audience. “Sneezers” are the people who launch and spread an ideavirus. They are similar like the “talkers” from World of Mouth: they need a reason to talk about you. The reason is your remarkable benefit. You need to know who are your target customers first and you need to know who are willing to talk about you. From National Survey, it reveals people more willing to “Like” a product on Facebook rather than write a review. Thus, it’s important to give people right tools, make them easy to spread your product information. Blue Nile’s target sneezers are potential customers who are considering to buy diamond rings or jewelry lovers. Meanwhile, they are actively online users who are willing to share their shopping experience with others.

Minimize but not eliminate risk

There is not free dinner. If you want to do something big you have to take some risk. Fortunately, at most of the time, the risk can be minimized and even avoided. The beginning processes before milking a purple cow are very important. We need to do market research and make sure our idea can satisfy customers’ requirements and make them excited. If it’s necessary we need to use Alpha testing(home testing) and Beta testing (customer/market testing) as well. Before Blue Nile launches a new marketing tool, it needs to test this tool for a while first and make sure it will not cause problems in the future.