Consumers tune in to what they want, when they want it
I recently got hold of Meatball Sundae, a new marketing book by Seth Godin, best-selling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. The title was quite intriguing; I immediately searched for what, exactly, it means.
A meatball, Godin says, is a commodity, an average product for average consumers; something that you need that is produced in large quantities to make the price more affordable. Traditional mass marketing is used to sell the commodity to the largest possible number of target markets.
The problem, though, with a meatball, Godin states, is that it is quite a challenge to nurture it, since in such a state, most marketers have just about everything they need. In today’s new marketing practice, the ubiquitous new media are considered the toppings, the whipped cream, the cherries and the sprinkles of the sundae. For meatball makers, who have huge budgets and, as such, are used to spending money on expensive advertising, it is tempting to turn around and order marketing people to get some of that new media marketing magic, citing Google’s rapid growth as a benchmark.
When you do that, though, Godin warns, you end up not with a full-flavored concoction, but something with perhaps a sour aftertaste. Toppings don’t go well with meatballs, he emphasizes, and attempting to force new marketing tools to work with an old marketing product, managed by an aging marketing organization, will not blend.
Meatball Sundae is about how you build a business that works with new marketing paradigms, because the fact is, most people work for companies that were built around old marketing modes. Old marketing came first — the idea that you could advertise average products to average people. And then people invented companies to go with it, not the other way around. Meatball Sundae has a restrained but rebellious lesson — change the media, and the organizations change, too. Specifically, you can go to e-Bay instead of your favorite retail chain or order from Amazon instead of the local bookstore. Godin has a number of absorbing concepts in his new book. Here are some of them:
• In the last decade, the Internet and sweeping changes in media have afforded marketers all over the world a toolbox that allows them to generate attention with ease. Today, there are more sites on the web, more users of e-mail, and more viral ideas, online and offline. The numbers and possibilities are increasing fast. Cable TV networks are numerous and there are online radio stations aplenty. Not to mention word of mouth, experience marketing, and social networking.
• Companies, government agencies, political parties, advocacy groups, job seekers, and even people looking for emotional partners are all jumbling with a heightened sense of urgency, trying to exploit the power of newfangled implements in the web 2.0 era.
• The Starbucks, Amazons and Zappos of the world, for example, have grown and continue to grow by non-traditional means. What’s going on now is that every consumer is incredibly powerful; every consumer has his own platform, which gives him or her unlimited access to a different new media — from Google, YouTube, Multiply, Friendster, and MySpace, among others, which have indeed signaled the beginning of the new future.
• Among the new media, Google and other search engines have literally cut and crashed the world into pieces. Google sends you practically everything you ask for. By atomizing the world, Google destroys the end-to-end solution offered by most organizations, replacing it with a pick-and-choose, component-based solution.
• Yahoo did brilliantly for a decade by selling immeasurable Internet advertising. Google changed that equation by going to smaller companies and selling totally measurable ads for a nickel. You could pay a nickel a click, and then the competition site was willing to pay a dime. Then it became a dollar, and now some ads are a hundred dollars a click, all because of their measurability.
• Bundling is harder than ever. It was the glue that held together almost every business and organization. You may bundle donations and parcel them out to charities that deserve them, bundle TV shows and present them with ads on your TV network, bundle the items in your industrial supplies catalog and hand it to the business buyer, or bundle 30 businesses and house them in one big office tower. Bundling has been here for so long that you may have forgotten you were doing it. But the world has now been unbundled. Like it or not, there you are.
• The biggest change the new marketing brings is the easiest to overlook, mostly because it’s so obvious. Every organization now has the ability (and probably the responsibility) to deal directly with the world — with customers, prospects and those impacted by the organization’s actions — without insulation and without middlemen.
• The asset that can be built online is permission — the privilege of marketers to market to people who want to be marketed to. This asset is big and valuable enough to build an entire business around, like what Amazon did, and such “permission marketing” privilege upsets traditional power structures in just about every industry.
• Traditionally, commercials were 30 seconds, a minute or two minutes long. Then someone came up with the brilliant idea of running two per minute, then four. Now there are radio ads that are less than three seconds long. It’s not an accident that things are moving faster and getting smaller. There’s just too much to choose from. Audible.com, for example, offers more than 30,000 book titles. If an audio book isn’t spectacular, minute-to-minute, it’s easier to ditch it and get another one than it is to slog through it.
• Rich people are not just different from the rest of the socio-economic classes; they are, in fact, different from each other. Rich people used to do similar jobs, wear similar clothes, live in similar neighborhoods, and read similar magazines. As a result, marketing to rich people was pretty easy. Nowadays, that is no longer the case. As the divide between the rich and the poor continues to widen, the number of people that are considered rich increases daily, and in the process, the diversity of the rich increases as well.
• Most everyone wants choice. Choice makes some people stressed and unhappy. But it also makes lots of people happy. People have choices — plenty of them. By itself, a bias towards choice is interesting but not particularly surprising. What’s surprising is the magnitude of this desire. A great example to compare a typical Barnes & Noble store with Amazon. If you examine the sales of 150,000 titles in a big B&N store, you’ll see that they account for perhaps half of Amazon’s online book sales. In other words, if you aggregate the millions of poorly selling titles on Amazon, they add up to the total sales of all the best-selling books in the physical world put together.
• The biggest challenge in the era of the marketing sundae is that there is a bottoms-up phenomenon. Most businesses don’t have a CEO who says, “Let’s reorganize the company around new marketing principles.” Instead, what you have is a leader who exerts pressure on hardworking, well-meaning folks lower down in the organization who are told to make these newfangled marketing approaches work with maturing-to-old organizations.
• Today, the consumer has a lot more power, and they can tune into the things they want, when they want them. They are greatly attention challenged, have the power to have their own channel, and the power to broadcast, not just receive. And to a marketer, this means that if you get caught, or if someone doesn’t like you, he or she is going to tell everybody. That’s word of mouth that can really harm.
Meatball Sundae makes you understand that you don’t get to decide what the market demands. The market does.
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E-mail bongo@vasia.com or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com for comments, questions and suggestions. Thank you for communicating.
