AdHack Blog

Posted:
30 September 2009 @ 10pm

By:
James Sherrett

Categories:
AdHack Live, Business, Community, Contests, Ideas, Notices, Trend Spotting

Baked In Recipes and Wiki/Blog

Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves book cover

In less than 12 hours you get to join us on AdHack Live for a video chat discussing the new book from Crispin Porter + Bogusky‘s John Winsor and Alex Bogusky called Baked In.

To kick off the conversation, a few more details on the book itself and how it extends beyond its covers.

The book is divided into 3 parts:

  1. Part One: Preheat Your Mind
  2. Part Two: 28 Rules to Help You Bake
  3. Part Three: The Way Forward

The majority of the book comprises the 28 rules or ‘recipes.’ Each recipe is 2 parts: a topic for discussion and a plan to put the topic into action.

The topic generally consists of stories drawn from the day-to-day experiences of Winsor and Bogusky. They’re great and tangible. The plan takes the recipe and provides some easy tactics to put it into practice where you work.

For example: Culture Trumps Influencers.

Make a list of the cultural trends that influence your consumers’ behavior. Take your time; all of the items on this list will not be immediately apparent. Stay with it, and you will gradually observe more and more. Be a good observer. Remove yourself from your own cultural perspective. Look for the absurdities, the incongruities, the things that don’t necessarily make sense. You will begin to laugh as you start to see the culture from the outside. (Laughing is a good sign.)

Find out what’s really beneath the existing trend. Is the truth under the truth? Use the And1 example: Was it that NBA stars sold sneakers because they were in the NBA, or because they were famous ball players? If it is the latter, then any famous basketball player can sell shoes. So let’s make somebody new famous. Let’s create the fame to create the sales.

In your business, what is the accepted cultural convention? If you get the right fix on this, you can flip it on its head and make it your own.

Pretty interesting and useful, right?

Then each recipe has a unique hashtag. The one for Culture Trumps Influences is #convention.

Add that hash tag to a Twitter post and your contribution gets rolled up with other participants’ contributions to form an ongoing discussion of the specific recipe.

The home site for Baked In is called a wiki/blog. Wiki because it’s editable by anyone who wants to create an account on the site. Blog because it’s built on WordPress and rolls by blog-style.

So each recipe is editable and accompanied by the specific Twitter posts that reference it. Nice.

And did I mention that all 28 recipes are on the wiki/blog? Yup. Go check them out.

Then come back tomorrow morning, Thursday, Oct. 1, at 9 am PST / 12 noon EST, and join us on AdHack Live to join the conversation.

Ask a question and you may well win yourself a copy of Baked In.

(And if you miss it we’ll archive it for replay, though the freebies will be gone.)


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  1. [...] of what the book is all about. Find it here. Reviews of the book are here, here, here, here, here and [...]