Hijacking a Brandjack – How would you do the Pat the Baker campaign?

Brand-jacking is the idea of taking a brand and without permission going off using it to promote yourself. Here’s another definition:

Brand-jacking happens when a third party hitches a ride on a brand’s fame, positioning and slogan and uses them for its communications’ own purposes – whilst undermining the brand’s reputation in the process

At the recent BarCamp, Alexia Golez and Pat Phelan had decided to take a few brands and build a whole online marketing campaign for them, whether they liked it or not. There is nothing malicious in this, the idea is to actually get more coverage for a brand but the ambassadors doing it are unofficial. I like that idea. You see many design and photoshop challenges getting people to redesign sites or logos and it is a way of people showing off their abilities. So I’m hijacking this great idea.

You may have heard of the Pat the Baker Bebo campaign, apparently me blogging about it made people buy sliced pans.

MySpace Music Party - Bryan Thatcher of Empressr and Michael Birch Co-Founder of Bebo
Photo owned by b_d_solis (cc)

If you were to run the Pat the Baker “online marketing ” campaign, what would you do?

With all the tools out there now, many of them free, what ways would you engage with the public? Blogs, Facebook, Bebo, Google Ads, special games, advertising or clever hook-ups with websites like Boards.ie and Rollercoaster.ie?

There is no prize for this, no reward except showing off your knowledge and skills here. If this works, well I might turn it into a regular thing on this blog. I’m sure many companies might volunteer to be the mark for the brandjack.

7 thoughts on “Hijacking a Brandjack – How would you do the Pat the Baker campaign?”

  2. Pingback: Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Fluffy Links - Wednesday November 26th 2008

  3. if we done a QiK/ youtube – and – using explosives, blow up a sliced pan of Pats famous loaf.
    Of course the slogan and blog post title… ‘wouldn’t it have been easier to use the toaster’.
    Put it out on twitter username @nohandsleft

  4. Damien

    Some ideas
    Put in a coupon for 10c off each loaf (or 5c) or whatever amount. And allow people to print it out.

    A competition – best YouTube video featuring Pat the Bakers bread. Prizes €1,000 €500 and €250.

    p.s. when I previewed rather than posted my comments the name, email and website disappeared and had to be re-entered

    Best blog post featuring a story (funniest, wierdest, whatever) about a loaf of bread. Again prizes for best

    Strangest use thats been made of loaf or slice of bread. Again prizes for best.

    Best recipe involving Pat the Bakers bread. Again prizes for best.

    Run them through a website and social networking site(s). Use Jaiku or Twitter for best Haiku composition about Pat the Baker (or maybe best Limerick)

    Do these qualify as an attempt to turn bread into a social object.

  5. Let me expand on my brief comment last time. Engage with people on Twitter.. have a online presence. If a robot like the mars rover can develop a personality and have people follow it, no reason why a bread company can’t? People follow RTE to get news updates, why not have @patthebaker to get bread updates?

  6. Try vertical search, focusing on images, The Google image results page rankings. You would need to get a critical mass of images linking to Pat the baker website or blog. You would then get picked up on Google image search results page, with the pat the baker website URL listed under every image. Maybe put out an appeal on twitter for webmasters or marketeers to link one image on every site to Pat the baker.

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