Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?

In this book, bestselling author, Seth Godin, compares marketing to an ice cream sundae. Godin describes the comparison – “All these tactics (blogs, e-mail, YouTube videos, MySpace pages, Google AdWords) are like the toppings at an ice cream parlor. If you start with ice cream, adding cherries and hot fudge and whipped cream will make it taste great. But if you start with a bowl of meatballs . . . yuck!”

Godin refers to boring brands as “meatballs”. The boring brands may still be beneficial but they don’t create word-of-mouth attraction. Let’s take Budweiser, for an example. Seth shares with his readers, “When Anheuser-Busch spends $40 million on an online network called BudTV, that’s a meatball sundae. It leads to no new Bud drinkers, just a bad case of indigestion.” This marketing tactic just entertains the existing Bud drinkers – it does nothing to promote the product itself. Will this campaign spread virally? Probably – but again, it’s not likely to bring in any new customers.

In Meatball Sundae, Godin frequently refers to “Fourteen Trends”. These are trends that are changing the way ideas are perceived and spread in the New Marketing.

Here are just a few of the “Fourteen Trends”:

Amplification of the voice of the consumer and independent authorities
Extremely short attention spans due to clutter
Google and the dicing of everything
Infinite channels of communication
The shifts in scarcity and abundance
The triumph of good ideas
The wealthy are like us
New gatekeepers, no gatekeepers

Godin always does a great job of getting us to think outside the box, and making things seem crystal clear.

If you have a product or organization that just isn’t catching on, then you should grab a copy of Seth Godin’s book; Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?
It’s a good read.