Summary of Meatball Sundae-Seth Godin

Summary of Meatball Sundae-Seth Godin

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. As Seth Godin explains in his remarkable book, meatballs are the basic staples, the stuff that used to be marketed quite well with TV and other mass market techniques. The sundae topping is new marketing. The problem? New marketing is lousy at selling meatballs.

Seth points out fourteen trends that are remaking the business world. Transforming what we make and how we make it. This is a book about the right question. Not “How do we use the cool new tools to support our existing structure” but “How do we become an organisation that thrives because of the New Marketing?” Ask not what the new marketing can do for you. Ask what you can do to thrive with the new marketing.

New Marketing is exciting, but it seems to work best for people who start from scratch, who build their foundation around the idea of their marketing. The good news is that you don’t have to start from scratch. In fact, existing organisations have significant advantages. The challenge is that you have to be willing to become an organisation that is in sync with the new marketing. In a world of choice, compromised solutions rarely triumph.

The three challenges are straightforward:

1.       Find a market that hasn’t been found yet

2.       Create something so remarkable that people in that market are compelled to find you

3.       String together enough of these markets so you can make them into a business

Through the course of this book Seth points how the challenges businesses face in today’s market. We know that the old marketing tactics are no longer as powerful as it was a few years back. The marketplace is cluttered with a whole lot of noise and it’s not going to change anytime soon. The only way we can survive this is if we create something remarkable and make it easy for people to share it with a friend. We need to incorporate the new marketing tactics and align our businesses in such a way that it becomes part of our product/service. If we adapt to this changing times we will be sure to thrive.

If the new marketing can be characterized by just one idea, it’s this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than the ideas delivered at an individual. The opportunities for optimizing your current meatball strategy have never been better. Feel free to comment on this blog if you have any ideas or points on this topic. Overall I think this book can be of great ue to anyone stuck in a difficult place and needs some help deciding your next step. If you do not have this book yet I suggest you get it and read it for yourself.