Meatball Sundae Is Your Marketing out of Sync?

by Godin, Seth

• ISBN13: 9781591841746
• ISBN10: 1591841747
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-27
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover

Summary

Gotta get me some of that New Marketing. Bring me blogs, e-mail, YouTube videos, MySpace pages, Google AdWords . . . I don’t care, as long as it’s shiny and new.” Wait. According to bestselling author Seth Godin, all these tactics are like the toppings at an ice cream parlor. If you start with ice cream, adding cherries and hot fudge and whipped cream will make it taste great. But if you start with a bowl of meatballs . . . yuck! As traditional marketing fades away, the new tools seem irresistible. But they don’t work as well for boring brands (meatballs”) that might still be profitable but don’t attract word of mouth, such as Cheerios, Ford trucks, Barbie dolls, or Budweiser. When Anheuser-Busch spends $40 million on an online network called BudTV, that’s a meatball sundae. It leads to no new Bud drinkers, just a bad case of indigestion. Meatball Sundaeis the definitive guide to the fourteen trends no marketer can afford to ignore. It explains what to do about the increasing power of stories, not facts; about shorter and shorter attention spans; and about the new math that says five thousand people who want to hear your message are more valuable than five million who don’t. The winners aren’t just annoying start-ups run by three teenagers who never had a real job. You’ll also meet older companies that have adapted brilliantly, such as Blendtec, a thirty-year-old blender maker. It now produces Will it blend?” videos that demolish golf balls, Coke cans, iPhones, and much more. For a few hundred dollars, Blendtec reached more than ten million eager viewers on YouTube. Godin doesn’t pretend that it’s easy to get your products, marketing messages, and internal systems in sync. But he’ll convince you that it’s worth the effort.

Author Biography

Seth Godin is the author of nine international bestsellers, most recently the New York Times bestseller The Dip. His other books include Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside!, All Marketers Are Liars, and Small Is the New Big. He is also the founder and CEO of Squidoo, and one of the most popular business bloggers in the world (www.SethGodin.com).

Table of Contents

Thinking About the Meatball Sundae	p. 1
The Fourteen Trends	p. 49
Direct Communication and Commerce Between Producers and Consumers	p. 51
Amplification of the Voice of the Consumer and Independent Authorities	p. 71
Need for an Authentic Story as the Number of Sources Increases	p. 87
Extremely Short Attention Spans Due to Clutter	p. 96
The Long Tail	p. 102
Outsourcing	p. 113
Google and the Dicing of Everything	p. 119
Infinite Channels of Communication	p. 125
Direct Communication and Commerce Between Consumers and Consumers	p. 133
The Shifts in Scarcity and Abundance	p. 139
The Triumph of Big Ideas	p. 151
The Shift from "How Many" to "Who"	p. 158
The Wealthy Are Like Us	p. 163
New Gatekeepers, No Gatekeepers	p. 169
Putting It Together	p. 177
Case Studies	p. 195
Conclusion: It's Not an Organization, It's a Movement	p. 229
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.