A meatball sundae is made up of good old meatballs served with fancy sundae toppings. It doesn’t sound too appetizing and that is author Seth Godin’s point. Godin wants to steer marketers away from making a meatball sundae because meatballs and sundaes, two perfectly good things on their own, just don’t go well together. And if they are combined for some reason, the meatball sundae won’t taste very good.
Meatballs are the average stuff sold to average people in a traditional way using Old Marketing. Godin defines Old Marketing as “the act of interrupting masses of people with ads about average products”
The fancy toppings are the tools and tactics of New Marketing that make magic happen. New Marketing has the power to transform an entire organization into something it never used to, while creating a magical experience along the way for all those involved. New Marketing is about using “every interaction, product, service, and side effect as a form of media” to earn the attention of consumers.
The challenge is that marketers can’t just swap Old Marketing for New Marketing. You also can’t just mix tactics of Old Marketing with strategies of New Marketing to get the best of both world; it won’t work. Sadly, you can’t fight the new realities and try to hide under a rock. Godin advocates that marketers work with New Marketing and get in sync with it. It’s not about asking what New Marketing can do for you, but asking what you and your organization can do to thrive with New Marketing.
Godin points out that “specific marketing models require specific organizational models to back them up”. New Marketing doesn’t actually demand better marketing, it’s a much bigger issue that doesn’t just exist within the marketing department. You can’t just use New Marketing to sell the same old stuff. New Marketing demands better products, services, and organizations. That’s what makes it transformational and a magical experience.
The greatest successes with New Marketing have been among newer, younger, and smaller start-ups. Not because these organizations are new, young, or small, but because they are willing to change and adapt. Marketing has changed because the “landscape of tomorrow” has fundamentally changed. That’s why organizations need to realize that the future will not look like the present. And doing what you have always done will not get to where you want to be.
How organizations become or stay successful is through marketing. Marketing isn’t just a supporting arm of the organization. Marketing should have the throne while being supported by the entire organization. Marketing is KING because it has the power to transform what we make and how we make it.
Here is Godin’s tribute to Marketers:
– We spread ideas
– We tell stories people want to hear and believe
– We translate emotion into action
– We close the sale
– We make things people want to buy
– We run things
The best marketers understand this: all we as people and consumers ever want is to be treated with respect and be connected to others around us.
Godin outlines 14 New Marketing trends that leverage this insight to continuously create marketing magic. The trends are not NEW since the book was published a few years ago, but they remain RELEVANT. Note that organizations don’t need to adopt all 14 trends. In fact, choosing the select few and being great at them might be what it takes to create just enough magic.
Below are my top 5 takeaways:
- Always create products for the consumers. It’s not about you, it’s about the consumer. And if you are interrupting the consumer in any anyway, then its spam.
- We as people like hear our own voices, to be heard by others, and to hear what others think. We think we are so unique, but most of us just want to be like most people, most of the time.
- People like to look for truth and authenticity from other people, not marketers. So what marketers can do is “create ideas worth spreading and make it easy for people to spread them”.
- We have extremely short attention spans as a result of all the clutter. So for marketers, there are no second chances and no learning curve. Whatever you do, best to get it the right the first time.
- Lastly, don’t be in the middle. People want ordinary things that are cheap or special things that are worth the premium price. “Anything in the middle is boring and not good enough”.
At the end of the day, whatever you do, you need to be committed and focused. You can’t have both the meatball and the sundae. You can focus on the meatball and continue to make improvements to your organization using new tools and technology that exist. Or you can try something new and shake things up around you and “start a movement”. Pick one, get everyone on board, and commit to it.
