Picture yourself driving through the countryside. On both sides, cows: brown, white, black. At first you might glance at one or two, but after a while you stop seeing them. They become part of the scenery. All the same, all forgettable.
Now imagine that, among them all, a purple cow appears.
You'd hit the brakes. You'd stare at it. You'd pull out your phone to take a picture. And the first thing you'd do when you got home would be to tell someone: "you won't believe what I saw on the road."
That's exactly the effect your business should have: making people stop, look, and talk about it. And the uncomfortable truth is that almost no business pulls it off.
"Being good" stopped being an advantage
For years the advice was always the same: do good work, take care of the customer, offer quality, and success will come on its own. And it was true… when there were few options.
Today your customer has dozens of options a tap away on their phone. In that world, being good no longer sets you apart: it's the price of entry. It's the minimum. Everyone in your field is "good," or at least says they are. And when everyone is good, "being good" stops being a reason to choose you.
It's not that you do things badly. It's that doing them well is no longer enough to stand out.
The field full of brown cows
Think about your own field for a moment.
Say you own an auto shop. There are twenty others in your city. What do they all say? "Honest, fast, fair prices, work guaranteed." From the outside, to the customer who doesn't know you, they're all exactly the same brown cow. And when they can't tell one from another, how do they choose? By whoever's closest, or cheapest.
The same thing happens with a construction company, a bakery, an accounting firm, with almost any business. When the customer finds no real difference, the only thing left to decide on is price. And competing on price is a race to the bottom: there will always be someone willing to charge a little less, until nobody wins.
Being a brown cow isn't a quality problem. It's a problem of no one seeing you.
Painting your business purple
At DISSAU, we call the way out of that trap painting your business purple: turning it into the purple cow of its market.
It's not about being the loudest. Or the cheapest. Or the biggest. It's about being memorable. About being the business worth stopping for, the one people want to talk about. A business worth a remark.
And let's clear something up right away, because a lot of people get confused: being purple isn't about clowning around, or wearing costumes, or spending a fortune on ads. It's not about being the funniest. It's about something built into the way you work —and over the course of this series we're going to unpack exactly how it's done—. A small business, without a cent in advertising, can be far more purple than a big company that spends millions on being forgettable.
The comfort that makes you invisible
There's a reason most stay brown: it feels safe.
Nobody criticizes the brown cow. It goes unnoticed, bothers no one, gets no bad reviews. But nobody remembers it, recommends it, or looks for it either. In a saturated market, blending in with the rest isn't protection: it's slowly disappearing.
Being different is a little scary. But staying the same as everyone else, today, is the most dangerous path you can take.
We'll dig deeper into this trap later in the series, because it's one of the most expensive there is.
And we'll be honest with you: this is, at heart, the same reason DISSAU works the way it does. Almost everyone offering services for businesses offers a single piece —accounting over here, the website over there, the legal paperwork somewhere else—. Being the one that brings it all together in one place, from the start, is our own way of being a purple cow. So we're not preaching something we don't apply to ourselves.
So, where do you start?
Here's the interesting part: the first step isn't to change anything yet. It's to see clearly where you stand.
Because most owners believe they're more different than they really are. The brown cow doesn't know it's brown. And before you can paint your business purple, you need to know, honestly, which parts are already standing out and which are blending in with the rest of the field.
That's why we made the Purple Cow Diagnostic. In about 2 minutes, answering honestly, you'll discover how memorable —or how invisible— your business is today, and what's holding it back. It's free, and it's the best place to start.
This is the first article in a series where we'll unpack, step by step, how to turn an ordinary business into one people can't stop talking about, with your own resources and without needing millions. In the next installment we'll talk about what it really means to be "remarkable," because almost everyone gets it backwards.
See you on the road. 🐮💜
Does your marketing feel more like luck than strategy? Read also Stop doing slot-machine marketing. And whenever you're ready to make the move, at DISSAU we help you stand out from the start. Talk to us.
