Baked in: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves

by John Winsor, Alex Bogusky, John Winsor

Book Overview

Brands must build a new relationship with their customers and the culture they participate in. The old rule was to create safe, ordinary products and combine them with mass marketing. The new rule:... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932841466
• ISBN13: 9781932841466
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Agate B2
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.8" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

You either have it or you don't

There are few books out there that really cut to the heart of the matter, Baked In is one of those books. In regard to marketing, what are your customers saying about your product? Who is designing your product? Is your product a solid representation of your brand? OR are you faking it? Gone are the days of big business telling the consumer what the brand stands for and why they should buy the product. There is no place to hide...the customer interacts with your product and becomes brand representatives. If you have exceptional products, you will have exceptional representation by the consumer. If you products are average or less than average...you had better look out!

What is marketing?

Marketing can't be directed like the old days in a command and control world that just doesn't exist, and Baked In in the perfect little book to get everyone to see how great marketing should be done today.

Worth your while!

No one reading "Baked In" should assume that Bogusky and Winsor are going to divulge all their marketing secrets, but there are definite golden nuggets in this well-conceived book. Simply put, Baked In encourages companies to remember one simple rule: your product, not your marketing, is your most effective tool. Their advice is clever and succinct, and at a slim 152 pages you won't suffer information overload at its completion. I am not a business person - hell, I didn't even think I was interested in advertising - but I read Baked In with a fascination that extends well beyond the reach of the industry itself.

buy, read, enjoy, start baking in

Reading this book is like having a power lunch with two of the smartest practitioners of our times: Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman of Crispin Porter, and John Winsor, Crispin's Executive Director of Strategy and Innovation. It's almost-pocket-size format and compressed 150 pages are a quick read in 3 parts. Starting with a short primer to preheat the reader's mind, with the beef in the center (28 rules for baking in) and a brief rallying cry to take a more holistic approach to making the world a better place in the closing chapter. Part 1 makes an excellent case for a new rule: create truly innovative products and build the marketing right into the products. It's a call and a challenge to marketers to take all the customer insights and actually bake them right into a new product, and to elevate both design and marketing to a strategic level. Which, the authors say, will ultimately allow the product and marketing story to be connected and to sell itself. Considering that our industry is to blame for the problem that products too often tell one story and the marketing tells a different story, the authors are making a compelling pitch for the product to not be separated from the message, but that the product should rather be the message. With a rather logical conclusion that marketing needs to have a seat at the table with product, and the product needs to have a seat at the table with marketing. We've all heard it before `innovate or die', but today's hyper connected society adds some urgency to this broadly accepted mantra since mediocrity is getting extinguished with increasing speed as it becomes more important what people say about your brand than what brand say. This book is a timely reminder that brands are built through great, innovative products at a time where fear and financial pressure gets marketers to settle too often too soon for incremental improvements vs. real innovation. Part 2 is packed with a healthy disrespect for common beliefs and offers a refreshing random number of "28 new rules." Each rule is supported by a real life brand example and each is coupled with a recipe that serves as a practical thought starter and pointer for readers on how to make the product itself the most powerful brand-building and business tool to grow revenues and profits. The rules range from rather self-explaining theories (like `culture trumps influencers') to more odd ones (like `hug the hairy monster') with interesting labels you're likely to add to your business vocabulary (like `organizational IQ'). I.e. I didn't quite realize that I'm a `silo jumper' and a `heretic', or at least nobody told me before that this is a good thing in business. The list also makes you feel good about stealing, trusting your intuition, having fun and being fearless (with the exception of when it comes to mediocrity). Part 3 is a wholehearted pitch for effective innovations and for creativity to be the ultimate business weapon. And with not only the marketing model bein

A great read

Baked In is a book that nails one of the simple things many organizations, particularly ad agencies, have forgot. The worlds of product development and marketing should not be separate. In fact, you create a much more powerful business and brand when you bake marketing directly in to the product. It's about blurring the difference between product and marketing, an idea that has created things like Nike+ and Help Remedies and has revitalized brands like Domino's. And while a lot of the examples used are about physical products, there's lots of examples, and applicable thinking, of how the digital space can be used for more than interruption, destination creation and the application of old ad models, but for the creation of meaningful products and services that foster powerful conversation and communities around them. It's a really practical read, packed full of case studies, bite size thoughts and exercises - very much, a book that encourages learning by doing. And, unlike most of its peers, it talks in plain English and doesn't overstretch the point. It's a thought provoking 150 pages rather than the usual four hundred pages to drag out an idea that might have best been served as a blog post.