What’s a meatball sundae you ask? Well, besides being the brand-spanking new book offering from bestselling marketing author Seth Godin, it’s also an analogy in which Seth uses to describe instances of when “boring” companies and brands use newly available and popular marketing strategies and tools to push their products and services.
American Express could have become PayPal, but they watched the opportunity go by. FedEx uses technology to make shipping easier for the customer; UPS uses technology to make shipping easier for UPS. Who’s winning? Google has broken the world into tiny bits. No one visits a Web site’s home page anymore; they go in the back door, to just the place Google sent them.
New Marketing, whose tools include things like MySpace, YouTube, Web sites, permission marketing, cable TV, and viral techniques, is reshaping our world. But many companies try to use the tools without first getting their organization and products in sync with them. The result: what Seth Godin calls a “meatball sundae”. A big, ineffective mess.
In his trademark style - clear, accessible, jargon-free - and full of real-life examples, Godin reviews how marketing used to work and explains how to use the New Marketing to become a better organization: faster, more flexible, and even more fun.
