Product Description

What is a meatball sundae? It's something messy, disgusting and ineffective, the result of combining two perfectly good things that don't go together. Meatballs are the basic staples, the things people need, the stuff that used to be marketed quite well with TV and other mass market techniques. The topping is new marketing: MySpace, websites, YouTube, and all of the magic that CEOs wish would shine atop their companies. The problem? New marketing is lousy at selling meatballs. When confronted with the myriad opportunities presented by new marketing, people usually ask 'How can we make this stuff work for us?' This, as Seth Godin explains in his remarkable new book, is exactly the wrong question. Mapping out 14 trends that are completely remaking what it means to be a marketer - and by extension transforming what we make and how we make it - Godin shows how the question for any thriving 21st century business must be: 'How can we alter our business to become an organization that thrives on new marketing?' Meatball Sundae is an essential guide to the fundamental shift taking place in the marketing and business world, and shows you how to align your business to it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22182 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Seth Godin is a best-selling author and was named by Forbes.com one of the top 5 web celebs in the business world. He holds an MBA from Stanford University, and has been called 'the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age' by Business Week magazine. Visit his website www.sethgodin.com

Customer Reviews

New take on the Marketing Mix or Mixed Metaphors?
While not exactly mixing his metaphors, Seth Godin certainly comes close with the antithetical image he conjures up in the title of this book - as he did with `Purple Cow'. It's an old rhetorical device. Nothing wrong with that if it gets your audience's attention and you have something interesting to say. But whether I would describe what Godin has to say as `remarkable', I'm really not sure.

There's no denying Godin has a dynamic approach to getting his ideas across. And there are some `remarkable' insights in this book, although many of them have appeared in his previous works. And whisper it quietly, many of them are often variations on well-established marketing theories.

What is special about this book is that Godin provides a real and practical sense of how the internet is changing perceptions about marketing. But in a desire to get our attention, and attain guru status he has a tendency to overstate his case. As with many business gurus there is also the tendency to resort to `common-sense' assertion and easy-on-the-ear sound bytes.

For many of us on the European side of the `Big Pond' the old marketing Godin writes about never quite had the hold it seemed to have in the States. And if you are a small business or SME (small & medium enterprise) it tends to be even less relevant. So, to a certain extent, I agree with Godin that much of the older, conventional marketing overstretched their big idea and now it is being found wanting. But I'm not sure it should be dispensed with altogether. And to be fair, Godin doesn't really say this, although his rhetorical flourishes mean this point often gets lost.

My reservations about Godin's book - and here I'm being rather `picky' - is that some good `old marketing' approaches, particularly those that have focused on the importance of building relationships, will have dropped off the radar when the `cream' of the new marketing has begun to curdle. Now that's really mixing your metaphors!

I also have reservations about how a growing `brand' of new marketers make great play with the idea of `authenticity' to make their case. They seem to take it rather for granted that it is a straightforward matter to recognise what count as `authentic' offerings.

Godin claims that if new marketers concentrate on offering `an authentic story that matches our worldview, we'll believe it.' What he doesn't acknowledge here is how the TV industrial complex, which he claims to be outdated, has influenced and continues to influence our worldview. Arguably, part of what the internet does is simply `bounce' and echo these `worldviews' across cyberspace.

And in his conclusion, Godin offers some very old-fashioned marketing theory when he states: `[New marketers] are going to grow fast using [their] knowledge of human nature and the New Marketing that allows people to express their nature.' This sounds suspiciously like old marketing to me. Why it is Godin is able to lay claim to having meaningful insights into human nature, I'm not quite sure. Maybe it has something to do with the occupational hazards of being a business guru.

Fantastic, insightful and easy read
Absolutely brilliant book. It put into words concepts that I knew were true in my head but I couldn't quite express them. I love it for two reasons: 1) It will hopefully help me build rational arguments to convince senior management in work that "New Marketing" is the way we need to go, and 2) It's given me a brilliant framework, some real world case studies, and solid advice that I'm going to apply to my own personal projects and enterprises to help them excel!

The book discusses, describes and gives advice on the practices that "New Marketing" companies (Netflix, Amazon, Google etc) have used to become the successes they are today, and how the lessons learned and philosophies that are driving this era of new marketing can be applied to and used by more 'traditional' organisation.

The one downfall I could point out is that Mr. Godin encourages us to make something remarkable, so that users/customers/readers will spread the word. This book is so remarkable that I almost don't want to recommend it to others, as I want to keep the advantage of having this knowledge to myself! :)

This was a great read
This was a great read. Seth writes fast, firing out lots of interesting examples. I read Seth's blog regularly and believe I'm well up to speed on new marketing but still found lots of nuggets here. I found myself putting this book down a couple of times to visit the websites he mentions as he moves along. Enjoy.