At a previous agency, we came up with the concept of ‘Brand Explosions’ as a strategy to tell powerful brand stories for our clients. The idea was to have a core thought at the centre and then explode the idea through as many consumer touch points as the budget would allow.

The idea of having the core idea explored through multiple channels was not new, the name ‘brand explosions’ was. It’s fair to say, brand explosions resulted in some good award and commercial success for the agency and our clients.

A handful of years later though, things have evolved or maybe I have. Rather than revelling in the violence of a brand big bang, I have been feeling a gradual movement toward a gentler yet potentially more potent way of connecting with people - the search inside the product for a story that differentiates not on a traditional marketing basis but on a product level that transcends marketing or media channels anyway.

Then I read Baked-In, the book we’ve mentioned on our blog previously. It just nails it! They describe this movement with the notion of ‘baking-in’. Literally baking the marketing into the product. A product created in such a fashion will not require the traditional marketing spends as consumers spread the word for you.

The book is a living example of the theory. Little if any money was spent on the marketing. The marketing was baked-into the book as it relies on twitter and blog posts to share tasters of the thinking.

Simple, gentle, potent.