Outrageous Marketing

The Story of the Onion and How to Build a Powerful Brand with No Marketing Budget

By: Scott Dikkers

Narrated by: Scott Dikkers

Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

A funny, inspirational audiobook about how to build a brand.

Number one New York Times best-selling author Scott Dikkers tells the hilarious, outrageous, and deeply personal story of how he built the most trusted news source in America, The Onion.

The Onion started as a small college humor newspaper in 1988. How did it grow to become a worldwide comedy brand with millions of social media followers and rabid fans today?

Brands today tend to follow the herd when it comes to marketing and branding, but often it's running in a different direction of the herd that gets you noticed.

The Onion did the opposite of what brands are supposed to do. The Onion didn't listen to its customers. It didn't give them what they wanted. It didn't engage with them. It was never "authentic". In fact, everything The Onion printed was fabricated, spoken through a phony facade. This was not by accident. It was calculated and executed with precision.

What’s Inside:

• How to court, woo, and seduce people to fall in love with your brand!
• How to recruit the very best and brightest minds in your industry to work for you!
• The single-best way to manage creative people on your team and unleash their full potential!
• The one thing every brand builder must focus on (hint: it’s not profits)!
• How to reach more people and create more fans using one, super-simple principle (hint: this is what made The Onion world-famous)!
• The fastest and most effective route to innovation - at work and in life!
• The one thing every brand must do to compel extreme employee advocacy and fuel creative success!
• The only way to achieve quality!

Scott Dikkers, founder of theonion.com and its longest-serving editor-in-chief, takes you back to the hardscrabble creation and unlikely rise of The Onion to a multi-million-dollar entertainment brand. Along the crazy and heart-wrenching journey are powerful principles and marketing ideas that apply to any kind of product or service.

©2018 Scott Dikkers (P)2019 Scott Dikkers

Inspiring and Hillarious

A detailed and entertaining history of the most consistently funny and subversive print comedy publication read by the author and founder of "America's Finest News Source" The Onion.

Plenty of valuable business insight and statagies applicable to a wide variety of crowded markets as well as unbelievably funny tales and accounts of The Onion's history from it's inception as a small time college humor rag to full blown multimedia comedy juggernaut synonymous with biting satire and irreverent, sometimes silly but always smart comedy.

Serious Business of Comedy

Great story about the early days and evolution of the Onion. This is not a funny, slapstick comedy book instead this is focused on the serious business of comedy. Scott provides excellent business advice and insight into the hyper competitive comedy industry and digital media. Excellent audio book read by author

Great

A must read for fans of The Onion. But also for anybody interested in how creative people function and adapt in a changing communication media business model.

The Permission You Need to Have FUN Again

When all of us were youths, we didn’t need marketing strategies to create the things we loved. We just did them, and when we kept doing them, others often took notice and joined in our play. Scott Dikkers, by recounting his quest to make The Onion irresistible to fans, silences the doctrine of status quo marketing by compelling us to rediscover the passion and motivation we enjoyed before becoming responsible adults. What’s more, Dikkers proves his outrageous approach can outperform traditional marketing techniques by connecting with fans straight from the heart. He invites us to remove our training wheels and try things that, with persistence, can increase our likelihood of profitability. What’s his answer to the risk of failing at this? Simple: if you’re in it because you love doing it, you will have fun regardless of the outcome. For anyone who is curious how The Onion climbed its way into our hearts, or needs permission to listen to their wilder, honest instincts, this book is indispensable.

The Story of the Onion...

...Should be the title of this book, with Outrageous Marketing as the subtitle. Everything promised on the cover is delivered, just not in the quantities I had hoped for. But I was bound to listen to one way or another as I am a fan of the Onion's comedy.

So settle in for Scott Dikker's autobiography. There are lessons along the way. If you're short on time, skip to the last few chapters. That's where the meat of the marketing material is. Overall I liked the book.

Gave me chills and diarrhea

I listened to this book without any proper vaccination. There were no government warning labels, so how could I have known. Lost 6 hours, 5 minutes and 9 pounds.