White Paper Weekend Reading

Alex Wipperfürth, of Plan B, a San Francisco-based marketing strategy boutique, is finishing a book titled Brand Hijack, which turns a marketing eye towards religious cults to better explain how household brands foster cultish relationship with their most evangelical customers.

However, Douglas Atkins has beaten Wipperfürth to the bookshelves with his with his recently published book, The Culting of Brands: When Customer Become True Believers.

I’m over 100 pages into The Culting of Brands and can honestly tell you to not buy Atkins’ cult brand book. Instead, wait for Wipperfürth’s Brand Hijack book.

Why wait for Wipperfürth’s Brand Hijack book?

Well, the other day I read a Wipperfürth penned white paper, How Cults Seduce and What Marketing Can Learn From Them, and found it to be highly poignant, well organized, and chock-full of keen marketing insights. In sixteen pages, Wipperfürth (damn it's fun to write ‘Wipperfürth’ – try it, I’m sure you’ll agree) accomplishes far more in his white paper than Atkins does in the 100+ pages I’ve read in The Culting of Brands.

Intrigued with Wipperfürth’s (there I go again with ‘Wipperfürth’) marketing mind, I found my way to Plan B’s website and lo and behold … I found more white papers worthy of reading.

The Tricky Business of Launching Brands

Re-Inventing the Creative Development Process

Speed in a Can – A Red Bull case study

Tormented by the Witch – A Blair Witch case study

The Marketing of No Marketing. (While not a white paper, it is a very good article on the rebirth of the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer brand and Wipperfürth’s [hee-hee] Plan B agency played a role in the resurgence of PBR.)

We at Brand Autopsy expect full reports from each of you on your weekend white paper reading.

Comments

[John Smith]

here's a good paper on strategy:

http://www.redefiningstrategy.com/StrategyRedefined.pdf

[cliff]

Does anyone else think there's something sinister here when marketers use soul-crushing techniques to peddle their commodities?

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Cliff, help us to understand which marketing techniques mentioned in the white paper you believe are especially soul-crushing.

My take is ... we are talking about ways to build stronger relationships between people and the brands/companies they choose to associate themselves with. Nothing more. Nothing less.

[Todd]

It will be interesting to see how the book Brand Hijack turns out. It is not unusual to see 16 page papers get turned into books and the book ends being a watered down version of the paper/article.

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Todd ... I hear ya. I've read too many over-bloated books whose ideas are way too thin to support 200+ pages.

To clarify, I was very impressed with the structure of Wipperfürth’s “How Cults Seduce” white paper. He systematically breaks down the culting process and articulately relates it to marketing principles. If Brand Hijack is structured in the same way, then I think it will be a worthier read than Atkin's Culting of Brands book.

The layout of ideas expressed in “How Cults Seduce” is far better than the layout of Atkins’ Culting of Brands. In 16 pages of Wipperfürth’s white paper I learned more about the correlation between culting and branding than I have learned in the 150+ pages I have now read in Atkin's book.

It’s not that Culting of Brands is bad. No, not at all. There is tremendous breadth and depth to how Atkin's relates culting practices with marketing practices. However, the poor organization of his great ideas is the biggest drawback to Atkin’s book. From chapter to chapter, Atkins’ book lacks a cohesive structure. It’s just too sloppy -- almost as if the book was rushed to market in order to get a jump on Brand Hijack.

Comparing this to a music example … the “single” (white paper) that Wipperfürth released has a nice groove to it, the lyrics are tight, and most importantly … you can dance to it. A solid gold hit song, foretelling of a great “album” (book) to come. On the other hand, Atkin's album (book) has some nice tunes on it but there are no breakout hits.

[Bob Bobster]

I was reading a post regarding "The Culting of Brands." It appears that a few people have jumped on the band wagon started by "The Power of Cult Branding." All these books claiming to be the "first ever book daring to compare brands to religion" are late to the scene by like two to three years.

"The Power of Cult Branding" has been available from Random House for about three years now. You can check more about it at: http://www.cultbranding.com.

[Steve Portigal]

About a year ago I had a quick look at "the manuscript" for "the book" and as far as I remember it didn't at all seem to be simply a cobbling together of the existing papers. I'd definitely set my expectations higher than that.

[Patrick A. Walsh]

I am halfway through Brand Hijack and couldn't agree more with John's comments. It is an enjoyable read.

I am however, having a hard time deciding two things: 1) If infectious market trends can indeed be premeditated. (as many of these brand marketing books tend to claim).
2) If it really is possible to investigate back to the beginning of an 'epidemic' and understand how the entire spectrum of events unfolded.

These are pretty outrageous pursuits and I need to be convinced they are possible before I can try to live out the information from Alex Wipperfurth. I have 150 pages to go.

[johnmoore (from brandautopsy)]

Patrick ... BRAND HIJACK is about to get very choppy. About halfway through the book, I felt it got extremely choppy. Wipperfürth says lots of smart things but I was disappointed in how disjointed the book is.