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Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? | 
 enlarge | Author: Seth Godin
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $8.95
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Rating:  49 reviews
Sales Rank: 6958
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 1591841747
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.8
EAN: 9781591841746
ASIN: 1591841747
Publication Date: December 27, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Hardcovered book with dustjacket. Brand new.
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Product Description
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 Sundae is 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 44 more reviews...
 Interesting Book, but does it work for Architects (I know we're not his primary audience)? November 16, 2008
J. Pang (Berkeley)
So I've been in the middle of reading a wide variety of books and Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae slips into the business/marketing area of my reading spectrum. Its a good read, easily taken in chunks, not surprising since he is a blogger. Actually, when I think about it I could easily imagine that most of his chunks are reformulated blog posts, but they hang together so nicely that it is not noticeable.
The basic premise of his book is that the new way of marketing demands a new way of doing business. According to Godin, the old way of doing things is to mass produce a bunch of stuff and then interrupting people (like TV ads) to get them to want it. While that has worked fabulously in the past, he contends that there are too many ways to get people interrupted and they are shutting off the interruptions that happen to them. Thus there a new type of marketing (direct communication with consumers, long tail, google, web2.0) has arrived and you can't just apply the new marketing to the old business model and expect it to work. As per his title, you can't just put flashy sundae toppings (cream, sprinkles, cherry) on the classic old meatball and expect anything good to come out of it. The web is not just a more efficient way of doing things, but a paradigm shift way of doing business with consequences that reach past the IT department.
However, as a designer, I'm not sure how new marketing works with my industry, even after reading the book. Part of the confusion is that Godin basic dichotomy is the mass versus the individual. If so, the architecture and design field is already a very personal profession (especially at the small firms that I have worked at). Maybe he's saying the paradigm shift is tilting the world towards my direction. If so, the lesson may well be that architects should get off of this mass production/prefab myth that they have been chasing for this past century.
Even so, I guess the book presents a mindset that may be useful in jumpstarting how one should view the role of computers in design, using them as more than just hyper efficient drafting mechanisms. Or it maybe a bunch of new-speak that isn't really work practicing. I'm just not sure -- but I do think it is a good read, even though it is less entertaining than his other book Small is the New Big (which actually is a collection of blog posts).
Six Elements Review - 7.1/10 November 7, 2008
Viriya Taecharungroj (Bangkok, Thailand)
Business as usual isn't working anymore.
Seth Godin portrays the orthodox business practice trying to embrace the New Marketing as "Meatball Sundae". Meatball is straightforward and ubiquitious. The New Marketing is whipped cream and a cherry
Part 1 speaks out the difference between the old marketing (mass media, TV, command-and-control) and The New Marketing (fashion, stories, permission and promises)
The highlight of the book is in Part 2, The Fourteen Trends
Trend1: Direct Communication and Commerce Between Producers and Consumers
Trend2: Amplification of the Voice of the Consumer and Independent Authorities
Trend3: Need for an Authentic Story as The Number of Sources Increases
Trend4: Extremely Short Attention Spans Due to Clutter
Trend5: The Long Tail
Trend6: Outsourcing
Trend7: Googl and The Dicing of Everything
Trend8: Infinite Channels of Communication
Trend9: Direct Communication and Commerce Between Consumers and Consumers
Trend10: The Shifts in Scarcity and Abundance
Trend11: The Triumph og Big Ideas
Trend12: The Shift From "How Many" to "Who"
Trend13: The Wealthy Are Like Us
Trend14: New Gatekeepers, No Gatekeepers
Part 3 is "Putting It Together", it is basically the conclusion with some nice case studies in the final part
What I'm going to tell you is the breakdown of the dimensions of the content of the book into six dimensions: ease of understanding (how easy it is to understand), distinction (how unique it is), practicality (can it be done?), credibility (does it sound true and real or is it from out of nowhere?), insight (Is it deep of is it shallow?), and reading experience
If a book is easy to understand, distinct, practical, credible, insightful, and provides great reading experience, I consider it an excellent book.
Meatball Sundae:
Ease of Understanding: 8/10: Seth wrote it very simply, each part is divided into small sections (blog-like) instead of a long chapter. 2 points taken due to a maximum use of technological stuffs which can be hard to understand by brick-and-mortar marketers unless he or she read it with an online computer.
Distinction: 7/10: There have been books already about these trends, The Long Tail, far too many books on outsourcing and these technological trends, a famous The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman offers a great insight on this. However, Seth Godin is magical in the sense that he can thread and tie them together.
Practicality: 5/10: Although there are many new and fun things to learn and the 14 trends, he did not offer much on how to ride the trend. I now have a blog, subscribed to Twitter, Squidoo, etc. Now what? The stories mostly stop there
Credibility: 8/10: Seth's words are honest and real, he wrote about blogs and communication and he is the master at it with examples of successes and failures and a long lists of examples from other sources in a small book.
Insight: 5/10: Since the book is divided into many small chunks, there is no subject that is deep. It is understandable though, this is no Philip Kotler's textbook.
Experience: 9/10: This book is fun. My feeling was like sitting with Seth Godin himself while he shows me what's in his laptop and what should we do with our browser.
Overall: 7.1/10: A very good book on how marketing is and will be and the trends changing the marketing landscape forever but too little on the spot on methods and how-tos.
 A Meatball Sundae is just what you need! October 20, 2008
Dana Detrick-Clark of Serious Vanity Music
Marketing genius Seth Godin has once again hit it out of the marketing ballpark with Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?. Colorfully and succinctly, Godin lays out what you might not want to hear: that the "Old Marketing" of television interrupts and mass marketing average products, is losing ground to the "New Marketing" in the Web 2.0 world, and you've got to pick a team.
With fourteen clearly defined considerations of New Marketing in his toolbox, along with enough case studies (from companies you not only already know of, but have probably worked with) to prove his points, Godin makes a great case for not only utilizing these new tools, but also for adapting your entire business structure to work with them.
What could be so compelling that a seasoned company would restructure into a fresh startup just to take advantage? The consumer. In today's online market, the customer is not only king, he's also the boss, the critic, and sounding board from which all new ideas come.
It's never been a better time to be a consumer, an entrepreneur, or a creative. With Meatball Sundae Seth Godin makes us all feel new again!
Essential Reading for Nonprofit Execs September 17, 2008
Doug Kenshol (Chicago)
Seth Godin is an expert on the use of new web-based marketing techniques. In the Meatball Sundae, he provides big-picture descriptions and examples of fourteen trends that are changing the business and marketing world. The book is visionary and easy to read but does not provide how-to details.
This is essential reading for not-for-profit executives whose organizations live and die based on the success of their marketing and fundraising efforts. While the book is aimed at the private-sector, imagine how you can make use of eBay, YouTube, Digg, and blogs to fundraise and draw attention to your cause.
Perhaps the best example of these strategies (not discussed in the book) at work in the public sphere is the success of Obama's online fundraising and community organizing machine. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032702968.html?nav=rss_politics
This is must-reading for everyone who wants to change the world.
Thinking Through Your Decisions September 1, 2008
Ken Lizotte (www.thoughtleading.com)
One thing about Seth's books is they always get me to thinking, and re-thinking. This time, I'm thinking about marketing in today's crazy upside-down new world. Every entrepreneur worth her/his salt should be thinking through their decisions about adopting new techniques, such as blogs and Twitter, and not just tag along with the crowd. Seth helps us sort it all out. For an expansion of concepts found in my own book, "The Expert's Edge," put this book on your study list too!
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