This work offers a summary of the book “BRAND HIJACK: Marketing Without Marketing” by Alex Wipperfurth.
Alex Wipperfurth is a partner at Plan B, a marketing consultancy firm based in San Francisco. Plan B specializes in grassroots marketing programs.
Companies like Starbucks, eBay, Palm and Red Bull have built multi-billion-dollar valuations without using any conventional advertising campaigns. The success of these companies demonstrate the smart approach to building a business and a brand in the twenty-first-century is to do what can be termed “marketing without marketing”.
More specifically, these brands create the illusion that success is happening serendipitously as driven by the users rather than as dictated by the corporation. This is the essence of marketing without marketing.
The key to building a brand nowadays is to let the market hijack your brand. The more marketplace involvement you have, the better – even if that takes your brand off in unanticipated directions. What you’ll ultimately end up with is a brand experience which is richer, better, more genuine and therefore more sustainable than anything you would have consciously developed yourself.
Brand Hijack offers a different approach to successful marketing in the twenty-first century.