Title: Meatball Sundae: How new marketing is transforming the business world (and how to thrive in it)
Author: Seth Godin
Published by: Piatkus
Reviewed by: Jed Murphy, interactive director, Carlson Marketing
Back in 1999 Seth Godin changed the relationship marketing landscape with the concept of ‘permission marketing’. He predicted the end of interruption marketing and a new era of customer opt-in and engagement. A decade later and permission marketing is a widely accepted norm, backed by data protection legislation that has caught up in the intervening period. His latest book demonstrates just as much foresight.
Godin’s core idea is that the advent of ‘new marketing’ – a term he coins for the combination of over a dozen trends – has changed the fundamentals of the discipline.
In the old world, products and services (the ‘Meatballs’) were successfully promoted via TV and mass-media communications. It was a formula that worked for decades. But the advent of the internet has changed the rules.
Godin believes that most brands make the mistake of trying to apply new marketing techniques to their existing mass-marketing strategies. He calls this the ‘sundae topping’; the array of new digital media and social networking, blogs, YouTube and Twitter. And trying to graft new marketing techniques onto old business models is as appealing as a sundae topping on a dish of meatballs. In fact, new marketing is very poor at selling meatballs. Instead, businesses should re-structure their organisation to cope with changes in customer expectations and behaviours.
Godin outlines 14 trends that are fundamentally changing the business world. Each is described in his easily-digestible style and backed by plenty of real world examples. He also references influential thinking of recent years, such as McConnell & Hubba’s ‘1 per cent rule’ and Chris Anderson’s ‘the Long Tail’.
Meatball Sundae is a wake-up call for all marketers struggling to combine their old world business models with the challenges provided by the Internet and digital media. This is an essential, if not always appetising, read.
