Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin – a review

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.

 

“Microtrends,” Mark Penn – a review.

Sometime around 460BC, the philosopher Democritus arrived at the first theory of atoms: that even the most solid matter can be broken down to microscopic, distinct and constant particles.    

This is how Mark Penn urges us to look at the socio-cultural landscape of today. It takes just 1% of people, asserts Penn, to make a dedicated anti-mainstream choice and this can become a movement that could change the world.  

Penn’s work in identifying and targeting the ’soccer mom’ niche while working as a pollster for the Clinton Campaign in 1996, led the New York Times to call him “The guru of small things.” He’s now doing the same pollster job for Hillary Clinton and advising Gordon Brown.   

Hillary and Gordon should find themselves charmed, entertained and engaged by Penn. “Microtrends” – 75 brief essays on emerging social niches in America – has a way with a well-turned phrase, and is full of good crunchy statistics designed to make the reader think about the current and future states of society.   

Who knew that 1% of Californians aged between 16-22 saw themselves as military snipers within 10 years? That knitting is one of the fastest growing activities among the MySpace generation, or that the tiny African island of São Tomé hosts twice as many pages of internet pornography as it has inhabitants?    

There is a telling moment, though, in the chapter on “Impressionable Elites,” in which Penn takes the view that once Americans begin to earn over $100,000, they start to care more about the personalities of political candidates than they do about their strategy and policies. This level of real involvement in issues is left to those in lower social strata. When the elites are talking about Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the rest of the world is living it.   

The Impressionable Elites, Penn believes, are the most easily spun by the kind of charm and effortless sense of knowledge in which he specialises. And this book, with its cover quotes from both Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, is clearly targeted at them. I worry that I’ve become one because the further into the book I read, and the more  conversational gems I file away for later use, the more I feel complicit in the book’s success.     

Much of this quotable value comes not from statistics themselves, but from Penn’s take on the likely causes and effects of these niche attitudes. But despite Penn’s dedication to deep quantitative research (the book has 38 pages of references) there often seems to be something deeply subjective in the theories that sit around his trends.  

For example, in his discussion of “XXX Men,” heavy users of online pornography, Penn casts pornography as the decisive force in the adoption of the VHS format over Betamax. The same thing is happening again, he claims, in the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, with the adult industry swinging it for the latter. This is at best anecdotal, but pure gold for the conversations of the chattering classes.  

It makes for engaging reading, but sits uneasily with a view of truth as a result of ever more detailed and objective polling. 

For example, a rise in the number of left-handed people is interesting. And it may possibly be down to more liberal attitudes in parents and the resulting individuality of their children. It seems improbable, however, that this rise in lefties might herald the coming of more great military leaders like the left-handed Charlemagne, Napoleon and Norman Schwarzkopf (Penn’s examples, not mine).   

There is also a sense in these conclusions of Penn working his day-job as cheerleader for the Clinton nomination. This sense then plays out in a number of visions of an America where, in a cliché that the Clinton campaign hasn’t shied away from, “Children are the future.”   

This vision of an obviously conservative America is also felt in the handful of European trends addressed. The large number of UK couples ‘Living Apart Together’ is to Penn an unconventional approach to marriage and family values. He then suggests problems for the property market due to “a literal doubling in the amount of housing stock required.”   

Or take Italy – 82% of 18-30 year old men are “Mammonis” (mummy’s boys), still living with their mothers. These are pointed out as a potential cause of depression or recession “as China takes over Italy’s manufacturing jobs.”   

Microtrends is deeply US-centric with a whiff of neo-con xenophobia. It’s possibly too glib and agenda-driven in some of its conclusions. More interestingly, it is a self-illustrating, and quite possibly self-serving example of how the microscopically-focused research in which Penn specialises can be used to identify and then engage with audiences. It’s also aimed squarely, and cynically, at the chattering classes. Should you read it? That depends on whether or not you see yourself as one of those chatterers. 

If you are in that niche (and you probably know who you are) the odds are – so good is Penn at his job and so engaging is his spin – that you’ll find a lot to enjoy and a lot to recycle over dinner or in the pub.  You’ll also be able to nod sagely should the Prime Minister start talking of the ‘triumph of the Starbucks economy over the Ford economy.”