Meatball Sundae – The New Marketing by Seth Godin

What business are you in? Marketing delivers the answer to that and marketing just changed!

A short summary of Seth Godin’s book, Meatball Sundae. We rapped this book as part of the Book Rapper book summary series.

14 Marketing Trends

14 trends are redefining marketing. These trends are transforming businesses that have the right products and the right approaches. They are crippling others that are stuck with meatballs. Once again marketing is transforming what we make and how we make it. 

Time honoured Old Marketing ploys have enabled business to flourish for over 100 years. Marketing was a vital, valuable given; and, it was high cost!

Basically, if you made beige products for beige people and revved up the advertising you made good profits. The arrival of TV post-WWII was a marketers windfall. To reap the benefits of this miracle worker all you needed was an efficient organisation or factory, dependable, uniform products and the readiness to outlay money to tell people about your goods and services.

Then came the New Marketing. It’s really unzipped traditional marketers. 

Too much stuff and scores of new publishing/broadcast options have started to erode the clout of TV advertising; the guaranteed golden goose is dead! Just as traditional marketers are adapting to these new rules, novel techniques and tactics have nudged in and picked up the slack. To a traditional marketer, an effective new marketing technique is more miraculous than TV; fast results, little apparent effort at near zero cost. Paydirt.

Caution – New Marketing Ahead

Caution! The New Marketing doesn’t work for everyone; and it doesn’t work as well as some would like. New Marketing is for intelligent organisations that are poised, prepared and ready to be propelled by its fresh tactics. It is slovenly at selling boring old products and services. From now on growth and profit come from a newfangled, integrated approach; one that combines the New Marketing tactics with fundamentally different products and services. Creation – design plus innovation – rules! 

The New Marketing is a sweet selection of tools, techniques and tactics that offers a huge payoff; and it works when used to sell something that goes fabulously with hot chocolate sauce, whipped cream, nuts and a cherry! 

If you’re still making meatballs, bad news looms.

Ask not what the New Marketing can do for you…

Ask what you can do to thrive with the New Marketing.

If your organisation or product is not geared to the new media, you’ll only be putting sweet toppings on your meatballs. 

The New Marketing – Questions to Ask and Avoid

Wrong Questions…

1. What’s the best way to have the New Marketing work for us?
2. How do we use the cool new tools in our existing structure?
3. Are we using New Marketing to maintain the status quo?

Better Questions…

1. What is the best way to organize our business to take advantage of the New Marketing?
2. How do we become a business that thrives because of the New Marketing?
3. If you’re not growing the way you want, how can your business be altered?