Making a meal of marketing

Book review:Having raised many of the right questions - especially the crucial challenge of how to align an organisation with a rapidly changing marketing environment - Seth Godin fails to answer them, writes Alan Mitchell

Are you confused by the web-enabled world of search, social networking, blogging, independent third-party reviews, peer reviews and online auctions? Are you looking for a clear exposition of what the main trends are, and what they mean for your business?

Seth Godin has earned himself a reputation for simple, clear messages, well told. In Permission Marketing, he showed that information overload means it is better to earn customers' permission to talk to them than just to blast ever more interruption advertising at them.

In Purple Cow, he observed that in a world of increasing clutter, products and services must be remarkable in some way that makes them stand out. In The Dip, he suggested that the difference between success and failure often lies in knowing when to quit and try something else and, conversely, knowing when to persevere, even if the going is tough.

In his latest book, Godin turns to Web 2.0-influenced marketing, or the "new marketing", as he calls it.

At the heart of the book is "the one big insight". Successful businesses are built around successful marketing tactics, Godin argues: "Marketing demands an organisation that matches it." So if they are to flourish, organisations must change themselves to get "in sync with the new marketing". A halfway house of the old and the new is not possible.

Hence the title, Meatball Sundae. A plateful of meatballs and a fudge sundae may both be wonderful dishes. But combining the two brings you not the best of both worlds, but something quite queasy instead.

Nevertheless, that is what too many companies are doing, argues Godin. They are rustling up meatball sundaes by plopping sundae topping (an ounce of social networking here, a dollop of blogging there) on top of stubbornly humdrum meatball businesses. It just won't work, he warns: you either embrace the implications of "new marketing" hook, line and sinker - which "requires an all-or-nothing commitment" - or else stick with your meatballs and become eclipsed. So, what exactly is "new marketing"? According to Godin, it defines a new era of commerce. First, there was "before advertising" when businesses were small and local and built things by hand.

Then there was "during advertising" where commerce shifted to mass production, "making average products for average people in bulk". Now we are entering an "after advertising" era in which "the landscape is fundamentally changed from the environment that drove commerce and organisations for the last hundred years".

But here we hit a problem. Godin does not seem to know what these "fundamental" business changes really are. Yes, he produces a table listing vital features of "the new", such as the shift from "spam" to "permission", from "product lines limited by factory" to "product lines limited by imagination", from product "features" to "stories", from "customer support" to "community support", and so on. And he tells us that it is something to do with "leveraging scarce attention and creating interactions among communities with similar interests". He devotes most of the book to a whirlwind tour of 14 trends - such as social networking and blogging - that are supposedly driving the new marketing.

But nowhere does he pin down what synchronisation really involves. Does marketing demand an organisation that matches it? Or do organisations demand marketing that matches their business model? Why aren't halfway houses between the new and the old possible? How are boring old meatball businesses supposed to make the leap to sundae selling?

Godin skips over these and other meaty questions. Having told us that "after-advertising" business models represent a "fundamental change", for example, he stops there, leaving us panting for more detail. "The New Marketing doesn't demand better marketing. It demands better products, better services and better organisations," he declares.

Meatball Sundaeis fun for those seeking a quick overview of the cool things that are happening on the internet. As ever, Godin draws the reader in with fast-moving, example-packed prose in easy-to-digest sections. But in this latest offering, style overwhelms substance. Having raised many of the right questions - especially the crucial challenge of how to align an organisation with a rapidly changing marketing environment - Godin fails to answer them.

He features on the front of the US edition in a chef's hat. Ultimately, though, the dish he serves up is more like a dog's dinner, with anything and everything thrown in, than a carefully considered recipe for successful change.

Meatball Sundaeby Seth Godin Piatkus £17.50