Lego guide to liberty

Napping on the job as strategy? Whatever in the world's next""a divide-and-poll quiz on TV for consumers to SMS the brand's future? Well, not quite. "Don't let the all-too-clever subtitle fool you," writes Alex Wipperfurth in Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing, "Far from representing the absence of marketing, this approach is the most complex sort of marketing possible, as well as least understood."

Let go: in two words, this is Wipperfurth's big idea. It is a combination of what's familiar to marketers as "co-opting customer competence" and "stealth marketing", on which enough books exist to use as interlocking Lego bricks, but nothing as enticingly posed as this. "Let go of the fallacy that your brand belongs to you," says the opening tenet of the Hijack Manifesto, urging liberal marketers to let people seize control of the brand, "It belongs to the market."

Red Bull's marketers let go. They winked, nudged and let whispers about the drink's formulation give it an aura of mystique. Marketers of Blair Witch Project let go too. They got the gullible to see the film as an authentic reality-shoot video. They let go, and watched the market make them their millions.

Like the title, this book reads like a clever cluster of Postits stuck on a vast Lego frame of business books (see the bibliography) from which these scribbled notes derive their wisdom. This is not such a bad thing. It gives the book its traces of charm: "none of these tenets is immutable" is the Manifesto's sole footnote. It also gives it the parts one's tempted to peel off and stick on one's own fridge (or Lego-frame of reading): Steve Heyer's description of cola as a "medium for other stuff": Leander Kahney's "anonymity allows people to be even more intimate" in the context of iPod-sharing: Linus Torvald's "software, like sex, should be free": and Jerry Zaltman's "research addresses at a surface level what consumers think about what managers think consumers are thinking about".

The trouble is that Wipperfurth wants to play liberator to the wider market too. So he's baffled by Sprite's zest for basketball. If that's not an indication enough of how lopsided his Lego stack is, he goes on to blithely suggest how Barbie can be resuscitated by projecting a brazen new Sex and the City persona. Worse is to come: he casts his penetrating light on the lessons to be drawn from cult phenomena in America. Seduce 'em first, then sell 'em your snake oil, he seems to proffer.

Let go? Heck, if anyone did own Marketing as a brand, he/she might've turned apoplectic by now""at this particular projection of its purpose, if not the author's disdain for the discipline's very first no-no (on falsehood).

Of course, that would be an over-reaction. Nobody owns Marketing. It's an intellectual endeavour open to all. But yet, anyone who draws sustenance from such an endeavour must worry about any distortion that could tar or stigmatise it publicly enough to disenfranchise him/her for life, a grave violation of liberty in itself.

Sorry Larry. Sorry Wipperfurth. Letting go sounds nice and liberal, but if the stakes are high, the responsible marketer ought to opt for circumspection. Don't nap. Take Sergio Zyman's advice, and exercise vigilance on "both the promise and the delivery". And refuse to be held in thrall to an infantile conception of liberty.

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BRAND HIJACK
MARKETING WITHOUT MARKETING

Alex Wipperfurth
Penguin Portfolio
Price: Rs 595; Pages: 280