Greatest Hits Blog

This week another one from Seth Godin - Purple Cow.

Download Purple Cow

Podcasts are back!  This week Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae.

Download Meatball Sundae

The one-sentence summary

Do the opposite of everyone else and you will be more distinctive.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

· There is absolutely no point in being just like everybody else. The most successful businesses stand out because they do something different.

· A Purple Cow is remarkably different from any other product.

· The old ways of marketing are dead, and being safe is now too risky.

· An Ideavirus is one that spreads vigorously, similar to the point made by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point.

· Sneezers are the spreading agents – experts who tell everyone about new products on which they are a perceived authority.

· Otaku is a Japanese word for something that is more than a hobby but less than an obsession. This causes people to pursue remarkable products to a level that is beyond the reason of most normal people.

· Compromise is the boring slot in any market, and all of them are filled.

· Old-fashioned mass TV-based marketing doesn’t work any more.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

· The book is short and pithy – you can dip in easily.

· There are hundreds of examples.

· It goads the reader into looking for remarkable products in their industry and beyond. These are the places where decent, original ideas will come from.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

· Many of the things he proposes are probably easier said than done.

· All the examples are American, so have less resonance in the UK.

The one-sentence summary

Don’t fool yourself that your company has modernized just because you are doing something on the Internet – work harder at changing the business itself.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• It is subtitled How New Marketing Is Transforming The Business World (and how to thrive in it).
• A meatball sundae is something messy, disgusting and ineffective, the result of two perfectly good things that don’t go together. Meatballs are basic staples – the stuff that used to be marketed quite well with TV and other mass market techniques. The sundae topping is the new marketing, which looks appealing to traditional companies but is useless at selling meatballs. He outlines 14 trends in new marketing:

1. Direct communication between producers and consumers
2. Amplification of the voice of the consumer and independent authorities
3. Need for an authentic story as the number of sources increases
4. Extremely short attention spans due to clutter
5. The Long Tail
6. Outsourcing
7. Google and the dicing of everything
8. Infinite channels of communication
9. Direct communication and commerce between consumers and consumers
10. The shifts in scarcity and abundance
11. The triumph of big ideas
12. The shift from “how many” to “who”
13. The wealthy are like us
14. New gatekeepers, no gatekeepers

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• For a century, successful organisations were built around traditional marketing tactics. New media alternatives have ended the guaranteed effectiveness of TV, and often deliver very fast results at almost no cost. But it doesn’t work for everyone and asking what this stuff can do for you is the wrong question. The right one is how can we change our business.
• Interruption as a media thought no longer works. Consumers regard it as SPAM and just hit delete or skip.
• The Long Tail demonstrates that in almost every single market “other” is the leading brand. Domination by hit products is fading.
• The classic bell curve with volume in the mid price range has been replaced by an inverted one, where very cheap and expensive are the most fertile areas.
• Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than ideas delivered at an individual.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Nothing