January 22, 2008
meatball sundae [part two]
Recently I did an interview of Seth Godin about his new book, “Meatball Sundae”. As Seth described it:
Meatballs are commodity products, built in a factory, advertised all over. Stuff we need. All the same. Average products for average people. Unremarkable, but important. The backbone of our world so far.
The sundae is the new marketing. Blogs and Facebook and google and crowdsourcing and all the stuff that we get excited about. It works great if you’ve got a social object or a purple cow. But put the sundae on a meatball and…
There’s a passage in the book that really got me thinking, all to do with ice cream:
Willie Wonka isn’t dead, but he’s bald
In the heart of the newly hip Union Square neighborhood in New York City is a brand-new landmark: Max Brenner [Chocolate by the Bald Man]. Max (I’m told that’s not his real name) purportedly runs a chain of incredibly expensive chocolate cafés based in Australia. He’s got almost a dozen shops there, with other outlets in Israel, Singapore, and the Philippines. The chain is profitable and growing fast.
This is the place to come if you want to order the Warm Chocolate Soup, which comes with crunch chocolate waffle balls, strawberries, and marshmallows and costs ten dollars. Or, for the ambitious, The Chocolate Mess, which is a warm chocolate cake eaten with spatulas straight from the pan, with a mountain of whipped cream, ice cream scoops, chocolate chunks, toffee cream, warm chocolate sauce, and possibly, toffee bananas. It’s $12.75 for one person or $37 for four.
Max’s is packed, with lines of up to thirty minutes for a table. And most tables are filled with adults, not kids.
Just down the street from a Max’s, you’ll find the much more reasonably priced Sundaes and Cones ice cream shop, which is pretty much empty.
Why?
If I want something ordinary, then it better be cheap. I can get cheap and ordinary by the gallon at Costco. On the other hand, today’s spoiled consumer is willing to pay almost anything for the exclusive, the noteworthy, and the indulgent.
Sundaes and Cones isn’t cheap and it isn’t expensive. The ice cream is delicious, but not revolutionary. They sell a good ice cream cone at a fair price. And that’s no longer enough.
A couple of days ago I wrote Seth the following e-mail:
Suddenly the thought occurs to me, that perhaps there’d be fewer ‘Meatball Sundaes’ out there if the Web 2.0-consultant-guru types spent less time trying to sell lucrative, hot-fudge-and-whipped-cream consultancy gigs to the meatball factories.
[Ice Cream Metaphor:] The thing that made Thomas and English Cut work so well was, well, he’s not selling meatballs. He’s not even selling Baskin Robbins. Heck, he’s selling something that makes even Ben & Jerries look kinda downmarket. And the hot fudge I bring to the table ain’t too shabby, either. On a good day, at least
Your passage in the book about the two ice cream shops in Union Square was totally correct. The trouble is, too many people are locked into the mass-market, neither-cheap-nor-remarkable bracket, so they’re not ready to listen to you properly yet.
I love your ideas, you know that, but I’m guessing it may take twenty, thirty, even fifty years for “Society” to fully absorb the brunt of your message. Luckily you have loads of smart, book-buying people out there who do get it…
We live in interesting times.
Seth wrote back to me the following:
THAT is the entire point of the book.
Phew! Someone got it!
Twenty years? Fifty years? Which is why Seth says what he’s talking about is not evolutionary, but revolutionary. Make of it what you will…
A VERY interesting thread going here.
One should be REMARKABLE in their niche, but it is not the secret required element to ensure success.
One should have an eye on QUALITY, but having the ultimate in quality will not be the sole element ensuring success.
PRICE is relative, and means many things to many people of ALL social strata.
VALUE will be determined by the consumer or purchaser of any good, service or product.
You can be the bar none unsurpassed, NUMBER ONE, the uber-best in your market, and still, there will be a portion (minor, major or equilibrium) of your market that could ‘give-a-shit’ about you, your business, your price, your quality, your convenience, your product/service/business.
Even as you grow your business, either carving out new market share, or earning/taking/out-competing market share from others in your market, there comes a point I call: Big Fish, small pond.
Big Fish, small pond occurs when your uniqueness cannot or will not be supported by your own market. At this point, you can either downsize to fall in line, or move to a bigger market. Drop a shark in a swimming pool, and he will eat all the folks. At some point, he either has to decide to eat his own poop, or move onto a new pool. Big fish, small pond.
Economies do not determine at what point you achieve big fish small pond, nor does quality, price…it’s customers who determine this as they vote with their dollars and their feet relative to your competition or market.
Marketing will do much to accelerate growth, or spread word, but marketing cannot delay the inevitable when you hot the wall of big fish, small pond. THIS is the point where logic defies reason, and a new process takes over. Tis new process is: Passion.
Passion will fuel you through the darkest days of start up. Passion will sustain you through the roughest economic times. Passion will carry you through the most negative naysayers. Passion is sometimes its own reward. Passion IS payment itself. Passion cannot be explained.
Creative genius understands passion. The need to create, the need to produce, the need to endure, are all based upon the intangible passion.
Passion is what drives you to do what you do, how you charge for it, why you give it away. Passion is what gives strength to say: ‘I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks, says, feels, or does’ and allows one to endure until they are discovered, become fashionable, or become mainstream, or not.
Passion cannot be given, taken, legislated out of existence, taxed, or negotiated. Either you have it, or you don’t and is the secret element that IS minimum requirement for success. There is no competitive defense against it, and all marketing is either fuled by it, or impervious to it. Passion will allow the big fish, to survive in any pond.
Be Passionate.
Sorry Darcy, I don’t believe in any silver bullets. Passion is a factor, a big one, but you can’t tell me that Dennis Kucinich doesn’t have passion, or that Ralph Nader doesn’t have passion, but that didn’t get them into the White House. I think the point Seth F. was making all along is that there are mathematical limits. All the athletes who make it to the Olympic games have passion, but only one per event gets the gold.
And in the right market people can succeed through total accident with no passion at all. Passion is one of many factors that matter in combination with all the rest.
Breaking free of any standard, and choosing to ignore or refuse to acknowledge rank is liberating. Being an olympic class athlete and NOT running the race, doesn’t mean one is any less a gold standard.
Or putting it another way: One can win gold in the special olympics, but you are still retarded.
The guy who was run out of business by Cabela’s does not prove that niche marketing doesn’t work, it proves that you can’t go niche in meatspace if you’re trying to compete with a giant retailer that floods that niche. We already knew that, we found that out decades ago when Walmart destroyed thousands of mom & pops. New marketing is, in part, exactly about how to combat that situation.
Getting online makes it possible for the Poconos guy to focus on one weird thing – I don’t know, maybe the perfect embodiment of some particular fishing lure – and sell it in Tokyo and Dubai and Prague. It gives him a space to compete in that Cabela’s can’t follow, they’re too big and not agile enough.
Yes, I’m afraid the guy in the Poconos wasn’t remarkable. And yes, I’m afraid that’s what did him in. He may have been excellent, but excellent is not remarkable. (Remarkable isn’t even necessarily tied to good, although of course that’s preferable.)
You keep talking about this giant cost of remarkability. Are you saying that Seth Godin or Hugh Macleod or I don’t know who are selling $50,000 seminars on how to be remarkable – that this “remarkable” thing involves a costly investment and that it can’t be done without sinking a lot of money into… what exactly?
I dispute your assertion that “remarkable is not costless.” Seth’s blog is free. His new book is about $12 on Amazon. It can fairly easily be obtained from the library for free. He has a half dozen important ebooks that are free. Hugh’s blog is free.
The advice on where marketing/PR/communication is going and how to get there is mostly free or extremely cheap. The infrastructure to start, say, a blog or Squidoo lens or Facebook account costs nothing or next to nothing.
And these sources of information have thousands of ideas for non-technical businesses to become remarkable and gain some ammunition against the giant megacorps.
If your dry cleaner knew the name of every customer and greeted them by that name, it would be remarkable. Some remarkable things are expensive and some are free.
If the alternative is “what a bummer, Walmart and Cabelas and Target and Home Depot are just going to put me out of business anyway, guess I’ll get a job there for $8 an hour and if I’m super lucky I might get health insurance,” screw that. I’ll go to the worldwide market and take my chances on remarkable, thanks.
Sonia said: ‘If your dry cleaner knew the name of every customer and greeted them by that name, it would be remarkable. Some remarkable things are expensive and some are free.’
Sonia, I consult with a lot of drycleaners with another one of my web sites. I can tell you, when I had my drycleaning shop, I little radio frequency chips that I could attach to clothes before cleaning. These chips allowed me to track how often a garment came in, who worked on it, how much in revenue it generated for my company, who it belonged to, what work we had done on it in the past, etc. I had placed a sensor in my front counter so that when you stepped up to drop off your soiled clothes, my Point of Sale system could read the chip in your pants and everyone could great you by name. To be able to do this one remarkable feat, it cost me 50 grand for the computer and software system alone.
This was just ONE of many systems and processes that made this little drycleaning shop not just remarkable, if was freaking amazingly astounding.
But, in the end, the only one who really cared, was the owner of this little shop. The innovation, the constant strives to perfection, it was all for no other reason than: can it be done? I dunno, let’s try this and find out.’
The cost of such innovation is falling. It doesn’t take much to create a new process. Michael Gerber taught me that. Typically, the only investment is time. Anything else is simply a cost of doing business. Sure, I spent a few bucks on print and paper to design the Pictograph system I devised to bring missed spots or stains on one garment in one hundred processed down to one garment out of 10,000 processed. I spent $2,000 on that innovation. I could have done it for less, but it was money I was going to spend anyway. Today, with the amount of open source tools available for free, I still innovate, and yes, the investment is mostly ‘time’. Time becomes expensive when I’d rather be doing something else, or when it’s time that should be spent earning revenue.
There is nothing that will stop someone determinined to get it done. ‘Damn the torpedoes’ is a way of life to some.
“But, in the end, the only one who really cared, was the owner of this little shop.” There’s the heart of it.
Fair enough that time is not an insignificant investment. It depends on what your opportunity cost is, though.
Darcy and Sonia, yes time is an investment. But if it’s not invested things do not happen, things do not get built, something is not learned, and there is no forward progress. People too often, especialy on the West side of the pond, want it NOW. They NEED it NOW. My friend calls it the ‘narcotic of now’; the belief in an instant fix, ‘the blue pill’ that takes you out of what you can’t stand into what you dream of, or whatever. Instant gratification with no investment. And if they don’t get it instantly it’s obviously bogus or a scam.
If you make only 100 suits a year you can take the time, invest it, to make it *right* and you’ll be happy and the customer will be happy.
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A couple of people have already tried the definition thing above but I’d say that it bears repeating in pretty simple terms because imo it changes the debate somewhat:
When Seth (Godin) says ‘remarkable’ I’ve always taken him to mean remarkable in the most straightforward sense — i.e. worth remarking upon. By this yardstick I’d argue that pretty much anyone can be remarkable (or at least a heck of a lot more than would be the case if remarkable meant literally the top 10% quality-wise).
Using this as a goal (/mantra/credo/mission/etc) would be practically beneficial for a lot of organisations, and that’s what I’ve always taken Hugh’s social object schtick and Sonia Simone’s remarkable communications message to be about.
I think I understand your point Seth F, and I do take on-board that everyone believing they’re the best doesn’t make them the best. What I’d possibly disagree with though is the general thrust of your argument. It seems to me that you’re essentially saying Hugh, Seth G et al are selling people snake oil (although I don’t presume you mean that as a dig, rather a critique) whereas I believe if people do think about the message (and adapt certain things to fit their specific business when required) then the advice given is actually exceptionally practical and usable.
Just my thoughts anyhoo, where I work I preach the Be Remarkable thing daily, and Seth F is certainly not the first dissenter (should that be heretic?!) I’ve encountered.
Hugh,
the cartoon at the top of this post is fantastic! Has nobody else commented on it? It sums up my last relationship perfectly. I shall pin it on my wall and look at it if I ever have doubts about walking away. Thank you Hugh!
Be remarkable or end up remarkable?
There is a systemic confusion by Seth G/Hugh M with the use of these terms.
Ending up remarkable is the product of survivorship — and the inherent bias with the story that goes along with it.
Be remarkable is a nice catchy marketing line: it is devoid of content, who wants to be unremarkable? Its illusionary meaning or content is due to the phrase being systemically confused with end up remarkable.
*Sigh* Michael Webster, “Remarkable” is just a metaphor. If you know of a better one, use it.
The point being missed is The Dip. IN the The Dip, Godin wrote that you should choose to be the Best of Breed in your Niche. As the bread chef said, he strives to be the best bread chef in his area. Bingo.
Now the part about knowing you can’t get everyone is also key. You need to know your customers / marketplace / niche / audience. You need to be authentic. You need to have a relationship with them.
Blogging won’t help Wal-Mart. And there probably won’t be another Wal-Mart. It sells meatballs — commodity items or as Godin says average things to average people.
In sales, you have to show value. If you think you are selling a commodity (a meatball), then so will your marketplace. No value means decisions are based on price (or outstanding relationships).
The Purple Cow is about creating a Remarkable service or product to stand in a Blue Ocean, a new marketplace. A Purple Cow allows you (the chance) to tell a story about your product that others will spread (Idea Virus).
I hope I explained all this clearly and correctly. It’s in my head right, but not always on paper right.