“Creativity is the ultimate business weapon” – Baked In

I was sent an advanced proof copy of a little book called Baked In: Creating Products that Market Themselves, by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor, two big advertising dudes.  Now I don’t usually do reviews, because I’m so busy reading stuff that I don’t have time to read stuff (haha), but I happened to take this book with me on a trip to Chicago and read the whole thing on the plane – and loved it.

First of all, the book is formatted like a little recipe book.  The title, Baked In, refers to products that have their marketing juju “baked in” or embedded in the essence of the product itself – in other words things that don’t need marketing spin laid on top.  Things that market themselves.   The bulk of the book is a section called “28 Rules for Baking In.”  I won’t give any of them away, but they are all gems.  They are all about thinking about things from a different angle.  Counterintuitively.  Subversively, in fact, seeing as we’re on a GenX tip right now.

Each “rule” has a “recipe”, like an exercise, for you to think about regarding your own business, and – here’s the awesomesauce – each rule has a Twitter hashtag associated with it so you can report back to them your thoughts on any of the topics.  You can tweet and the authors at @bakedin will collect and reply to comments and refer to them in the next edition of the book.

Ummm… they had me at “hashtag”.

“Creativity is like anthrax. It’s extremely potent, but it’s hard to distribute.”

LMAO!  The book is full of good quotes. Here’s another one:

“Why are people so afraid of so many things, but they are never afraid of mediocrity?”

Anyway the book goes through a bunch of examples of commercial products (and not just the obvious ones, which is refreshing) that market themselves in order to illustrate their 28 rules, but all the questions and lessons are applicable to any organization that has products and services.  And the ability to tweet about each “recipe” means you could potentially learn a lot from the conversation that happens around each particular one (obviously we won’t know until the book is actually available, right now it’s on pre-order at Amazon). Having said that, here’s the Twitter search for “bakedin”, there’s already some good stuff on there!

Just read this in another review:  “If Purple Cow and Ignore Everybody were to have a child, this book would be it.” Perfect!  Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Buy this book.  Oh, and check out their blog too. Word.

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