This is an edited version of my first review, now with fact correction courtesy of the author. Thanks Seth.
A friend of mine has a chart he likes to use when he presents on marketing in the age of Web 2.0. The X-axis represents ‘the amount of times I hear about the Long Tail’ while the Y-axis shows ‘the amount I give a shit’. This chart – a parody of the ‘power law’ distribution curve typically used to demonstrate the concept of the Long Tail itself – is used to make a powerful point. The key tenets of the new marketing are being devalued in their use as empty evangelical buzzwords by businesses that lack the vision and commitment to ever put them into meaningful practice.
It’s a point that’s hammered home repeatedly in this latest piece of impassioned and compulsively readable polemic from ‘Permission Marketing’ guru Godin, though in truth there’s little new in Meatball Sundae we haven’t heard from him before. Indeed, the ultimate message hasn’t progressed much beyond the key ‘markets are conversations’ insight that powered the ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’, which followed the rails laid by Godin’s earlier ‘Permission Marketing’. What Godin brings, however, to this latest discussion of 14 trends impacting business in the 21st century is an all-new, hard-line attitude: this time it’s do or die.
Marketers and their agencies, says Godin, are treating the techniques of the new marketing as simply so much whipped cream and cherries to be liberally dolloped over the top of old-fashioned ‘meatball’ organisations. The result – a focus on the cosmetic with no thought for bottom-up realignment with market trends – is predictably indigestible to consumers. ‘Ask not what the new marketing can do for you’, declaims Godin, ‘ask what you can do to thrive because of the new marketing’. It’s as a wake-up call to these meatball organisations that Godin takes such a strong position. This is an ‘all or nothing’ turning point in the way that companies organise themselves, and ‘sooner or later you’re going to play by the rules of this new game or watch the game get won by someone else’.
It’s also made clear early on that the winners in this new game are often start-ups free from the encumbrance of earlier structural and organisational models. This, says Godin, is why American Express never acquired PayPal, and why Barnes & Noble never became Amazon. They were unable to conceive of an environment where ideas are spread by groups of people and where consumer-to-consumer conversation is the new mass media. Success in this environment ‘doesn’t demand better marketing, it demands better products, better services and better organisations’. In short, you shouldn’t be looking at applying the lessons of Web 2.0 to your brand website, you should be looking at applying them to what your business actually does all day.
Elsewhere, the book – one of its author’s longest – delivers some trademark Godin touches. The familiar name-checking of small but successful inspirational companies you’ll never have heard of remains, (try Etsy.com, Sendaball and Threadless.com), as does the ever changing nature of the conceptual frames used to get the ideas across. With its dizzying talk of 2 ages of marketing, 3 eras of advertising and 4 separate industrial revolutions, it’s as if the book’s unusual length is intended to ensure that everyone – finally – gets the point.
Godin even finds the time to paint a bravura picture of 18th century craftsman Josiah Wedgwood as a game-changing pioneer of new marketing techniques. The pay-off, a comparison to Josiah’s older, set in his ways, and ultimately unsuccessful brother Thomas is as effective as an instructional tale as that of any of the new dot-coms Godin holds up for praise.
Another new riff for Godin’s axe this time around is his demolition of the concept of the advertising-led ‘Big Idea’ as still being at the heart of effective marketing. Big ideas in advertising worked well when advertising was in charge, but with mass media now neither as effective or desirable as they once were, the ‘Big Ideas’ that count now are those which are embedded into the experience of the product itself – like that of the BlackBerry, for example.
Meanwhile, God knows what Disney CEO Bob Iger has ever done to Godin, but the book ends with an example of how each of the 14 trends discussed can be pointedly applied to this company that appears to be conspicuously failing to recognise some very simple truths: the customer doesn’t care about you and doesn’t want to become a citizen of your branded world; you’re not in charge; customers are narcissistic; and they’ve already got worlds they’re happy in. You need to work out what to do in order to be invited into these worlds, rather than deluding yourself you’re somehow still running the game.
Find the time to take the long road through Meatball Sundae – even if you’re familiar with the territory (and really, you should be by now) you’ll still be inspired by Godin’s enduring passion and diversity of reference points. Better still, you’ll be armed with any number of examples to either help you make the case for reinventing your own organisation’s meatballs or to inspire you to resign and go work for a company that’s been paying proper attention to the changes of the last few years.
