Purple Cow Plus Mental Availability
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Carrie Rose's brand-building model pairs two ideas. The first is Seth Godin's purple cow: you drive past fields of cows without noticing, but a purple cow makes you stop. Since people see roughly a thousand adverts a day and, on her figures, around 89% of the £20 billion spent annually on advertising is never remembered at all, the only marketing worth making is marketing that gets remembered — and being remembered negatively, like the GoCompare singer, still beats being forgotten. The second idea is mental availability, the counterpart to physical availability: a Ladbrokes shop on every high street makes the brand physically available, but the goal is that saying 'gambling' makes you think Ladbrokes. Standout creative earns attention; consistent presence across every touchpoint in the category converts that attention into the automatic association that drives purchase.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Accept the baseline noise level
Start from the fact that your audience sees about a thousand adverts a day and remembers almost none of them. Anything unremarkable is being made for the 89% that gets forgotten.
- 2
Apply the purple cow test
Ask whether the campaign would make someone pull over. If it looks like the rest of the field, it isn't advertising — it's spend.
Pro tip Compare your creative against the last ten pieces of content your customer would have scrolled past, not against your competitors' decks.
- 3
Allow the idea to be irritating
Memorability matters more than likeability. The GoCompare ad is annoying and remembered negatively, yet it's one of only a handful of price comparison brands anyone can name.
Watch out This is a licence for distinctiveness, not for offence — the mechanism is recall, not controversy.
- 4
Build mental availability through consistency
Decide the association you want to own — say 'car insurance' and people think of you — then appear reliably wherever that category is being consumed.
Pro tip Map the association as a sentence: 'if I say X, you think us.'
- 5
Cover the whole journey, not just the purchase moment
People aren't placing bets all the time; they're scrolling sport content. Appear across TikTok, YouTube, ads, PR and how-to content so you're present long before intent forms.
Pro tip Include beginner-intent content — how to place a bet — as part of the coverage, not as an afterthought.
- 6
Attach the brand to an identity
Strong brands let people buy who they want to be seen as. Assume observers infer a person's job, taste and status from the brands they carry, and build the association deliberately.
In the wild
Ali points out that the meerkat campaign and the GoCompare singing opera man are the only two price comparison sites he can name. Carrie agrees: both are purple cows. The GoCompare ad in particular is remembered negatively — it's irritating — but that irritation is why it sticks. Comparable brands like money.co.uk and confused.com spend in the same category and leave no impression at all, which is exactly the 89%-forgotten problem in action.
→ Two deliberately annoying campaigns own the mental shelf space of an entire commoditised category.
Ladbrokes was one of Carrie's accounts and a hard brand to make interesting. Rather than chasing a single stunt in the style of Paddy Power, the strategy was consistency: appear wherever sports content is consumed — TikTok, YouTube, ads, PR, and content answering how to place a bet for the first time. High street stores gave physical availability; the always-on presence built the mental availability so that thinking about a bet surfaced the brand.
→ The brand is present across the whole user journey rather than only at the moment of purchase intent.
Common mistakes
Making advertising that is merely competent
Safe, on-brief work joins the roughly 89% of ad spend that is never remembered at all. On Carrie's numbers that's the majority of a £20 billion annual market being wasted because nobody built a purple cow.
Optimising for being liked over being remembered
Brands kill distinctive ideas because they're annoying or risky. GoCompare shows that negative memorability still outperforms pleasant invisibility.
Assuming physical availability is enough
Being everywhere on the high street doesn't make people think of you when the need arises. Without the mental association, distribution alone doesn't convert.
From the transcript
“if you drove along one day and looked in that field and all of a sudden there was a purple cow, you're going to pull…”
“20 billion is spent every single year on advertising.”
“But, then when it comes to mental availability, it's like how do we make sure that if I say gambling, you think Ladbrokes?”
From the episode
How To Build A Million Dollar Marketing Agency In 1 Year - Carrie Rose (Rise at Seven)
Carrie Rose (Rise at Seven)