The best marketing has always been a good product.
Seth Godin called this the "Purple Cow" effect in his book 24 years ago.
The premise is that if you're not remarkable, like truly worth stopping and remarking about, then you're just another option in a sea of options.
AI search is now putting magnifying glasses on Purple Cows, because it's looking for people "remarking" about things online.
And if you're not remarkable, you're increasingly invisible.
Like passing by a field of brown, black, and white cows.
Here's a real example...
Bobcat's CMO said customers are skipping their website and asking LLMs directly what loader to buy.
That's a $30k-$200k decision that people are outsourcing to AI now.
What these folks are getting from AI is reviews, dealer chatter, and earned media like industry write-ups and forum threads.
The polished content Bobcat spent years producing isn't at the forefront anymore. What other people are saying is now at the front...the good, the bad, and the ugly.
AI is putting it all together and forming a recommendation before a buyer ever hits your homepage.
So good marketing has to be backed by a genuinely good product.
At Summit 7, one of the things worth talking about is our bench of expertise.
We spent years pulling in the smartest people in the industry and teaching contractors how to navigate CMMC.
For us, the Purple Cow is expertise.
All the flashy lights and blinky propellers in the world mean nothing if your team can't deliver.
And AI is sniffing out exactly that.
So as marketers, we have to be willing to ask the hard questions about the value we deliver before we start looking to tell better stories about a sub-par experience.
Because Purple Cows are even more relevant today than they were 24 years ago.