So I’ve been in the middle of reading a wide variety of books and Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae slips into the business/marketing area of the reading spectrum. Its a good read, easily taken in chunks, not surprising since he is a blogger. Actually, when I think about it I could easily imagine that most of his chunks are reformulated blog posts, but they hang together so nicely that it is not noticeable.
The basic premise of his book is that the new way of marketing demands a new way of doing business. According to Godin, the old way of doing things is to mass produce a bunch of stuff and then interrupting people (like TV ads) to get them to want it. While that has worked fabulously in the past, he contends that there are too many ways to get people interrupted and they are shutting off the interruptions that happen to them. Thus there a new type of marketing (direct communication with consumers, long tail, google, web2.0) has arrived and you can’t just apply the new marketing to the old business model and expect it to work. As per his title, you can’t just put flashy sundae toppings (cream, sprinkles, cherry) on the classic old meatball and expect anything good to come out of it. The web is not just a more efficient way of doing things, but a paradigm shift way of doing business with consequences that reach past the IT department.
However, as an architecture person, I’m not sure how new marketing works with my industry, even after reading the book. Part of the confusion is that Godin basic dichotomy is the mass versus the individual. If so, the architecture and design is already a very personal profession (especially at the small firms that I have worked at). Maybe he’s saying the paradigm shift is tilting the world towards my direction. If so, the lesson may well be that architects should get off of this mass production/prefab myth that they have been chasing for this past century.
Even so, I guess the book presents a mindset that may be useful in jumpstarting how one should view the role of computers in design, using them as more than just hyper efficient drafting mechanisms. Or it might be a bunch of new-speak that isn’t really work practicing. I’m just not sure — but I do think it is a good read, even though it is less entertaining than his other book Small is the New Big (which actually is a collection of blog posts).