Meatball Sundae - Yum!
January 26th, 2008
I love Seth Godin. Already a huge fan of his blog, Purple Cow and The Dip, I of course made sure I picked up his latest (and in my opinion greatest) book, Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?
Seth uses real and profound examples of why ”traditional marketing” like billboards, radio spots and television advertising (the meatballs) and “new trends” like internet media, blogs, or anything else categorized as Web 2.0 (the sundae toppings) often fail when not in sync.
You are probably thinking what does a meatball sundae have to do with anything, right? Meat - good. Whip cream - good. No, probably not…but I am considering giving it a try.
Instead Seth uses the meatball sundae to create a visual comparison of companies trying to “be hip” by using the new Web 2.0 marketing techniques without integrating or updating the traditional marketing techniques within their marketing plan. One of the examples Seth uses is the $40 million Anheuser-Busch spent on Bud-TV, which added no new customers. His examples show how important it is for all marketing strategies within a company to be in sync or they will not be successful. The web 2.0 techniques are new and exciting, but any marketing initiative without success metrics, goals or a plan will not succeed.
I feel the lessons in this book are important for any company or interactive agency (like Indigio). For me, as exciting as the new web 2.0 marketing techniques are, it is important to remember return on investment (ROI). Unless, Indigio helps to build strategy and marketing techniques that increase revenue, create more customers or drive to a company’s success metric, we are not truly helping our clients. We need to remember this with every new initiative (and thankfully, I am proud that this is a focus at Indigio).
The book is broken into three sections. Section 1 is “Thinking About the Meatball Sundae” and discusses the history of marketing.
Section 2 is “The Fourteen Trends”, which discusses new trends in marketing, including:
#1 - Direct Communication and Commerce 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
Section 3 is “Putting It Together” and features great case studies. The case studies give real life examples of companies who have been successful integrating new marketing and other companies who have not. I personally found this section to be the most powerful, but I am a person that likes theory, but loves real life examples.
This book is definitely worth the read, especially if you are involved in any type of marketing strategy. It may change the way you think or in my case, I feel it helped to reinforce what I already knew.
