You’d call it absurd: a meatball sundae. Who’d ever combine the two?

Yet marketers do it all the time. They rashly garnish their meatballs—the traditional marketing basics their business is founded on—with fancy and tantalizing New Marketing tactics, such as social media.

CZ president Dave Goetz interviewed marketing guru Seth Godin about “New Marketing” and how organizations should think about and implement it for success.

B&S: How do I convince senior management to invest in New Marketing now for a payoff down the road?

Seth Godin: Well, it’s not easy. They got hired by someone who wanted them to do what they used to do, not to do something new. I’m not so sanguine that most of these organizations will figure out what to do in time. They surely missed the last two revolutions online. That’s why I wrote Meatball Sundae.

There are leaders who feel the transition you describe but also feel paralyzed about where to start. What is the intelligent starting point, aside from throwing lots of money at it?

Throwing money isn’t going to do it, not a chance. What will work is setting up something “across the street.” Get some great people, leave them alone, and challenge them to put you out of business by playing by the new rules. That’ll work.

Any examples of nonprofits that “re-launched” their organization into this new world of New Marketing?

The magic word is “re-launched.” Roomtoread.org and kiva.org and acumenfund.org didn’t re-launch—they launched. It’s the same way that Google isn’t called randomhouse.com and Wikipedia isn’t called britannica.com. I’m not so sure people have the guts to re-launch. I hope they do.

New Marketing is about building permission assets—direct to your community. How do you start building a permission asset today?

I think it’s about making a promise and keeping it. You measure every single day how many people WANT to hear from you. Not put up with it, but look forward to it. Complain when you don’t show up. If you measure that, and innovate around it, you’ll find it.

Social media allows you to engage your community in a real conversation. What are some of the things that kill authentic online conversation?

Social media isn’t about you, it’s about me. The minute you make it about you, I leave.

Which of your trends drives all the others?

The power of the consumer. To ignore you. To talk about you. To interact with you.

The Dip is inevitable in every great venture. You start out high on adrenaline, and then things don’t go as planned. The campaign doesn’t deliver the results you hoped for, the new business doesn’t scale, your enrollment or membership hits a plateau.

You’ve hit the Dip, says Seth Godin. And the key when facing a Dip is knowing when to quit and when to keep at it. In this interview with CZ, Godin explains why quitting is actually a good thing.

B&S: Quitting is important to success, you say. But organizations are notoriously bad at quitting activities that no longer work. Why such resistance?

Seth Godin: Nothing gets done in an organization without a meeting, and meetings about quitting are downers. They are associated with layoffs or failure. So they don’t happen. They get put off. It’s easier not to rock the boat, to let it ride.

Quitting a business venture often comes because of a lack of capital. You run out of cash. But you seem to believe that quitting in the dip goes much deeper than that. How so?

Why did you run out of capital? Is it because you didn’t plan for the Dip? Probably. We avoid thinking about it or talking about it. If you pick a project with a Dip you can make it through, your life gets a whole lot better.

You talk about the importance of being the best in a category, and how the world is getting smaller as well as bigger. How do you create your own micro-market? It seems the hard part isn’t being the best, but creating the new category so you can be the best.

Exactly!

McDonald’s and Starbucks did it. So did Motown and a thousand others. That’s the art of it. There’s no easy answer, except to try.

So what’s wrong with not being the best?

Superstars get a premium. Superstars can make more sales while they spend less on marketing. My point: if you have a choice, why not be first? And you usually have a choice.

It seems really hard to anticipate the emotions that swirl once you hit the Dip. Any advice?

The Dip is GOOD. It’s your friend. Without the Dip, you’re on a cul de sac, a dead end. If there is no Dip, you should quit. When the Dip arrives, have a party.

In Seth Godin’s new book, Small Is the New Big, he continues his harangue against lousy service, boring products, and quaint notions like “branding.”

CZ recently interviewed him about his new book and about the continual pursuit of “remarkable.”

B&S: In short, according to your book, it seems like the new business climate favors businesses with flexibility, speed, and creativity.

Seth Godin: I make the point that acting ‘small’, being responsive, treating people with respect, acting like your name is on the door—those are the traits that the market demands now.

When developing a new product or service or even creating a new marketing initiative, how do you know when to make adjustments?

Godin: I think the opportunity to let the market decide is greater than ever before. You can get in front of consumers faster and cheaper than ever before if you’re just willing to fail now and then.

So fail cheap. And often.

You don’t like “branding,” per se. What ultimately is your beef with branding?

Godin: Brand is an unmeasurable generality. It’s a shorthand, used by consumers as a placeholder for a varied array of beliefs. Instead of trying to manipulate that, I’m pushing people into measuring, into launching and watching, into doing, not guessing.

There is so much marketing clutter today that even ostensibly fresh ideas seem to lose out. Will even permission marketing go the way of the TV industrial complex?

Godin: Permission marketing can’t go away—human beings will always want to hear from friends (not strangers) who have solutions to their problems!

In this exclusive CZ interview with marketing expert Seth Godin, internationally bestselling author of All Marketers Are Liars, Free Prize Inside!, and, among others, Purple Cow, he suggests the world has changed, but our organizations haven’t changed along with it. Good enough won’t cut it anymore in a world of noise, clutter, and overblown expectations.

B&S: Are there any common characteristics among those who achieve remarkable, as defined by the contributors to your latest book, The Big Moo?

Seth Godin: I think the biggest shift is this: once you realize that being safe is the riskiest possible strategy, being remarkable is pretty easy.

How do you go about awaking people to how the world has changed, especially if the bottom line isn’t all that bad at the moment? How do you teach the need to be remarkable?

Seth Godin: How do you teach people to show up for work on time? To not steal office supplies? To not forge expense reports?

It seems to me that once you decide it is important and you reward people for it, it’ll start to happen.

What do people “miss” when you talk about being remarkable? That is, what do they overlook or not really get?

The giant thing is that they think they get some sort of say over whether someone thinks a product or service is remarkable. You don’t.

Can people inside an organization even recognize when something is remarkable? Can you train people to recognize remarkable?

Seth Godin: This is much harder than it sounds. Mainly because it doesn’t matter if YOU think it’s remarkable. It matters what the person you’re selling to thinks. My best advice is to try and try and try and sooner or later, you’ll make something that works.

Think back to a time when someone tried to change a belief (worldview) that you felt strongly about.

B&S: In All Marketers Are Liars, you talk about worldviews. How does one go about snooping to identify the soft spots in someone’s worldview? Any tips on how to listen and gather valuable information from one’s client list or student body?

Seth Godin: What a great question! I don’t think a worldview has “soft spots” though. Instead, I think there are hot buttons, places where people really want to tell themselves a story. The easiest way to do this is to watch which OTHER stories are appealing to this audience. People are very bad (and very ornery) about talking about an irrational worldview. But you can watch them all day and see what they choose to believe.

Colleges often use the storyline, “We’re ranked 23rd in U.S. News & World Reports Best Colleges in the Midwest” as the basis for their plot. Is that compelling?

Seth Godin: I’m not sure that this story is ineffective for the worldview of typical high school senior. The challenge is to identify a unique story that can find room in a brain that’s heard the “top college” story since 1652 at Harvard. One way is with sports. Another more productive and ethical one might be to obsess about a particular department.

In your book, you mention your Purple Cow concept. What if an organization doesn’t really have anything that spectacular to showcase—something that turns people’s heads?

Seth Godin: I’m saying that a Purple Cow is just a stand-in for the phrase “something about your product or service that your users will decide is worth talking about in a positive way.” Your story can be very compelling and it might sell me, but that doesn’t mean it will spread. That’s okay. You can use other techniques to get attention, as long as your story is compelling enough to get people to change their minds.

How does storytelling integrate with branding for smaller firms?

Seth Godin: Branding, it seems to me, doesn’t mean much any more. By obsessing about the story, an organization (of any size) can augment and leverage their brand.

No where are the stakes higher for parents and colleges than in thought-processes of a 17-year-old choosing a college. Often, there is no thought process. It’s an emotional, arbitrary decision: “A bunch of my friends are going there.”

The biggest challenge for small liberal arts colleges and large universities is the same: communicating their differentiation. CZ’s Dave Goetz recently interviewed Seth Godin, the author of the runaway best-seller, Purple Cow, and consultant to Fortune 50 companies, on “getting different.”

B&S: There are a zillion colleges, and no matter the “elite quotient,” their marketing materials look just like the community college in my area: viewbooks with copper leaves and cobalt skies and shiny-faced kids on mountain bikes. How does a university get different?

Seth Godin: The biggest challenge is realizing that, and accepting the fact that students don’t care about you. They care about themselves, not how old your institution is or how hard you’re working to get them to apply.

So how do you “Purple Cow” the recruitment process?

Seth Godin: And the answer is not to talk to them. The answer is to get them to talk to their friends. The answer is to create a fashion, an idea worth sharing. People don’t read brochures. People listen to their friends.

How do you create a message of differentiation when you really aren’t that different? How do you begin now?

Seth Godin: You get different. Different doesn’t have to be a new student center. Different could be a different application date or a different application or off the wall questions or a different tuition system or an interview system that works in groups or … or … or.

Why not have a varsity math team?

Seth Godin: You’re not nearly as limited as you think you are. Only when you do the insanely risky strategy of resorting to a four color brochure (which feels safe) are you doomed.