Meatball Sundae2019-04-04T09:06:04+00:00

MEATBALL SUNDAE – SETH GODIN

The one-sentence summary:

Don’t fool yourself that your company has modernized just because you are doing something on the Internet – work harder at changing the business itself.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

It is subtitled How New Marketing Is Transforming The Business World (and how to thrive in it).

A meatball sundae is something messy, disgusting and ineffective, the result of two perfectly good things that don’t go together. Meatballs are basic staples – the stuff that used to be marketed quite well with TV and other mass market techniques. The sundae topping is the new marketing, which looks appealing to traditional companies but is useless at selling meatballs. He outlines 14 trends in new marketing:

  1. Direct communication between producers and consumers
  2. Amplification of the voice of the consumer and independent authorities
  3. Need for an authentic story as the number of sources increases
  4. Extremely short attention spans due to clutter
  5. The Long Tail
  6. Outsourcing
  7. Google and the dicing of everything
  8. Infinite channels of communication
  9. Direct communication and commerce between consumers and consumers
  10. The shifts in scarcity and abundance
  11. The triumph of big ideas
  12. The shift from “how many” to “who”
  13. The wealthy are like us
  14. New gatekeepers, no gatekeepers

ELEMENTS OF THE BOOK I PARTICULARLY LIKE 

  • For a century, successful organisations were built around traditional marketing tactics. New media alternatives have ended the guaranteed effectiveness of TV, and often deliver very fast results at almost no cost. But it doesn’t work for everyone and asking what this stuff can do for you is the wrong question. The right one is how can we change our business.
  • Interruption as a media thought no longer works. Consumers regard it as SPAM and just hit delete or skip.
  • The Long Tail demonstrates that in almost every single market “other” is the leading brand. Domination by hit products is fading (see The Long Tail).
  • The classic bell curve with volume in the mid price range has been replaced by an inverted one, where very cheap and expensive are the most fertile areas.
  • Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than ideas delivered at an individual.