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B&N Tosses Hubcaps, Asks, ‘How Do You Fix a Flat?’

Barnes & Noble is launching a guerilla marketing campaign as part of a larger effort to promote its how-to website, Quamut.com.

The site - which touts itself as the “go to how to” - offers professionally written info that answers how-to questions. It also promotes how-to books and publications sold in the Barnes & Noble bookstores.

The guerilla campaign will have dismantled bicycles at bike racks in cities including New York, L.A., Seattle and San Francisco. The bikes will include signs that say, “How can you ride this bike again?” Signs on house plants at retail flower locations will say, “How can you keep us alive?” while abandoned hubcaps will have tags that read, “How do you fix a tire?”

Also as part of the campaign, delivery trucks in New York will be wrapped with Quamut messaging announcing a sweeps element, writes Brandweek.

Consumers can enter the sweeps online or via mobile texting. Winners get $5,000 to fulfill their how-to dreams.

The difference between Quamut and other how-to websites is the fact that Quamut is professionally written and edited - and is fact-checked, rather than user-generated and run by amateurs, according to B&N brass.