Seth Godin: How to Avoid The Meatball Sundae

This seminar is perfect for anyone wrestling with the collision of traditional marketing and the New Marketing that’s happening online. It’s all about avoiding the meatball sundae.

What's a Meatball Sundae?

A meatball is a commodity, an average product for average people; something that we need, something that is made in volume where we try to drive the price low and we use mass marketing, to sell it to the largest possible number of people. Meatballs paid the bills for our parents; meatballs are what our community has been built on.

The problem with meatballs is, it makes it really hard to grow, because now everybody who is in the market has just about everything they need. New Marketing is the topping to a sundae, the whipped cream, the cherry, the sprinkles. The New Marketing: it's MySpace, and Facebook, and Blogs, and YouTube and everything else. It's really tempting for meatball makers, who have plenty of money and are used to spending money on advertising to turn around and say to their marketing people, "Get me some of that New Marketing magic, because we want to grow just like Google."

Inevitably when you do that, you end up not with something tasty, but with a mess. Because toppings don't go with meatballs; and being inconsistent, trying to force New Marketing to work with your old marketing product and your old marketing organization, doesn't change New Marketing nor does it change the market. All it does is make you frustrated.