Where Did The Name Come From?

When mixing flour, egg and water the outcome depends greatly on the proportion ingredients.   The same is true for strategy development. We were working a project about what the major trends in marketing and advertising were likely to foretell for our clients.    In the process we came up with a number of common themes –customers seeking information in new ways, media fragmentation creating a new tactic du jour, products splintering into thousands of new categories, and a shift in trust or reliable sources.  

We developed several approaches emphasizing one trend or another. The finalists were a Word-of-Mouth or ‘chain reaction’ strategy and one that focused on a more traditional approach to product marketing. The concern with the first was scalability; the second lacked the crucial fact that people talk. In the end a combination of two ideas merged as Recipe 31.   (Recipe 13 was thought to be unlucky.)  

In a nod to revisionist history, the name is ‘obviously’ from the fact that Recipe 31 is the combination of research, strategy and on-going monitoring.