Boring is the riskiest thing you can sell
Seth Godin flipped the usual marketing advice — and made his own book prove the point by shipping it in a milk carton.
For decades the safe playbook was: build an ordinary product, then spend heavily on advertising to make people notice it. Seth Godin's argument in Purple Cow is that this playbook quietly died. People have stopped paying attention to ads that interrupt them, which means the old "safe" move — blend in, advertise loud — is now the actual gamble.
His test for a product isn't whether it's good. Plenty of good products are invisible. His test is whether it's remarkable — literally, worth making a remark about to a friend. A purple cow in a field of brown ones gets talked about; a slightly-better brown cow does not, no matter the ad budget behind it.
Godin practiced what he preached: the first edition of Purple Cow shipped inside an actual milk carton, cover printed sideways, sold for barely more than postage. It sold over 150,000 copies in its first two years. The lesson wasn't the stunt. It's that the stunt only worked because the book underneath it was worth talking about too.