The 22 immutable laws of branding pdf download

This complete summary of the ideas from Al Ries and Jack Trout's book "The 22 Immuable Laws of Marketing" shows that there is a widely-held assumption that marketing is a field in which anyone can succeed, with enough enthusiasm. This summary shows that marketing has rules of success, just like any other profession.

It highlights the 22 laws of marketing and explains why failure will ensue, should. It is important for anyone who has an interest inmarketing to read these laws. Using actual examples and sharp analysis, Al Ries and Jack Trout offer 22 "laws" that amount to a basic, concise distillation of their marketing experience and wisdom. Their examples are pithy enough to keep the most jaded marketing person engaged.

And their lessons are embedded verities that would be hard to dispute. The only drawback is that this classic may be a bit dated, so it is interesting.

In this business essential for the Digital Publishing professional, Indie Authors will learn the hands-on marketing strategies they never teach you in a creative writing course.

The book has been awarded with , and many others. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.

Heinz is the leader and everybody knows that in this freedom-loving, democratic, equal- opportunity country of ours, the better product always wins. Such claims are quite rare. They do consumer research. They ask customers why they buy the brands they buy. As a matter of fact, they go out of their way to deny it.

Why do you drink Coca-Cola? Or rent from Hertz? Or drink Budweiser beer? Everyone knows the better product will win in the marketplace. Since most people want to buy the better product, most people buy the leading brand. Advertising is a powerful tool, not to build leadership of a fledgling brand, but to maintain that leadership once it is obtained.

Companies that want to protect their well-established brands should not hesitate to use massive advertising programs to smother the competition. Indeed, advertising is expensive. And top-rated prime-time shows are equally ridiculous from a monetary point of view. So why spend the money? What comes to mind when you think about owning a Mercedes-Benz? Most people do. You might also associate attributes like expensive, German, well engineered, and reliable with the brand, but the core differentiation is prestige.

Lamborghinis are expensive, Audis are German, Hondas are well engineered, and Toyotas are reliable, but none of these brands conveys the prestige of a Mercedes. A word that nobody else owns. What prestige is to Mercedes, safety is to Volvo.

And, as a result, over the past decade Volvo has become the largest-selling European luxury car in America. Could you build a safer car than a Volvo? Probably not. What comes to mind when you think about owning a BMW? The ultimate driving machine. Yet none of these three brands Mercedes, Volvo, and BMW is a perfect example of the law of the word since they have all recently violated the law. Mercedes has moved into less expensive, less prestigious cars. Volvo into sporty cars.

And BMW into more luxurious cars. The minute a brand begins to stand for something in the mind, the company that owns the brand looks for ways to broaden the base, to get into other markets, to capture other attributes. This is a serious error and one of the most common mistakes in branding.

What word do you associate with the Kleenex brand? On the surface, Kleenex seems unfocused. There are sport Kleenexes, family-size Kleenexes, psychedelic Kleenexes. Kleenex is by far the leading brand of pocket tissue. What word does Kleenex own in the mind? Kleenex owns the category word. Kleenex is tissue. Kleenex was the first pocket tissue. Before Kimberly-Clark introduced Kleenex, there was no market for a pocket tissue.

But instead of expanding to toilet tissue and paper towels, Kleenex kept hammering away at its original focus. The pocket handkerchief virtually disappeared from the market, replaced by Kleenex tissues in their many variations. You know your brand owns the category name when people use your brand name generically. They were first, plain and simple. You can only become generic by being the first brand and establishing the category. Quite often you can create a new category by simply narrowing your focus.

Emery Air Freight, started in , was the first air cargo carrier. But Emery fell into the Chevrolet trap. Instead of focusing on one type of service, it offered everything. Overnight, inexpensive two- or three-day service, small packages, large packages. In the early seventies, it was a struggling player in the delivery business. But in a streak of brilliance, CEO Fred Smith decided to narrow its focus to overnight delivery only.

So what did Federal Express do next? It went global, where the very thing it had become known for, overnight delivery, is impossible. And it got into less expensive two-and three-day delivery. And it recently bought a trucking company. Virtually every marketing move Federal Express has made in the last dozen years has moved the company further away from the overnight concept.

Does this expansion hurt the brand? Does it hurt the company? Maybe not, as long as there are no competitors astute enough to narrow the focus and put the same squeeze on Federal Express that Federal Express put on Emery Air Freight.

So what did Prego do? With this one type of sauce Prego won 27 percent of the market. The same principle holds true in many different categories, no matter how narrow or obscure the industry. Bloomberg LP was the first company to introduce a device that would help money managers contrast and compare financial data.

Words are the key to brand building. Reality, of course, rests in a visual world of shapes, colors, textures, and dimensions. But reality has no meaning without the context provided by the human mind.

The mind gives meaning to visual reality by using words. Only when the mind thinks that an object is large or small, beautiful or ugly, dark or light, does that meaning arise. The same is true of the product or service you are selling. The product itself might have a visual reality. So you can forget about the laundry list of wonderful attributes your product has. You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute.

An attribute that nobody else already owns in your category. The average adult knows the meanings of perhaps 50, words. Yet there are about 2. And you want your trademark to stand for how many different attributes in the mind? They feel trapped in their present positions. They want to grow, so they think they have no choice but to expand their brands. But what works is not expanding the brand, but expanding the market.

In other words, instead of moving from overnight to two- or three-day delivery, Federal Express expanded the market for overnight delivery. By focusing on overnight, Federal Express was able to make overnight the in thing among business executives. Mercedes employed a similar strategy. What was the market for expensive automobiles before Mercedes-Benz? Mercedes built the market for expensive cars by using prestige as its strategy. They just hate to admit it.

You need to make your product or service more expensive than the competition. You need to find a code word for prestige. The first part was easy. Mercedes-Benz priced its vehicles at about twice the price of a comparable Cadillac.

It expanded the market by giving the owner an excuse to buy an expensive, prestigious car. Instead of a Cadillac, the car of choice for the country-club crowd became a Mercedes. But like Federal Express, Mercedes has also started expanding the brand with cheap sports cars, inexpensive sedans, and sport-utility vehicles.

With a name like Mercedes-Benz, a reputation like Mercedes-Benz, and a history like Mercedes-Benz the company invented the automobile , the brand should be the largest-selling luxury car in America.

Go back in history. By far the most successful brands are those that kept a narrow focus and then expanded the category as opposed to those brands that tried to expand their names into other categories.

What was the market for expensive pens before Montblanc? What was the market for expensive vodka before Stolichnaya and Absolut? What was the market for safe cars before Volvo?

Ask not what percentage of an existing market your brand can achieve, ask how large a market your brand can create by narrowing its focus and owning a word in the mind. Customers are suspicious. They tend to disbelieve most product claims. Your brand might last longer, require less maintenance, and be easier to use, but who will accept claims like these? There is one claim, however, that should take precedence over every other claim.

And makes every other claim much more believable. When Coca-Cola first made this claim customers instantly responded.

Everything else is an imitation. Credentials are the collateral you put up to guarantee the performance of your brand. When you have the right credentials, your prospect is likely to believe almost anything you say about your brand.

Leadership is the most direct way to establish the credentials of a brand. Coca-Cola, Hertz, Heinz, Visa, and Kodak all have credentials because they are widely perceived to be the leading brands in their categories.

Which is what Polaroid did when it became the leader in the new category of instant photography. Yet when it tried to tackle Kodak in conventional photographic film, Polaroid failed miserably. The simple fact is that Polaroid has no credentials in conventional 35mm film. Why buy your conventional film from Polaroid when Kodak is the expert in this category? Act literally does everything.

We wanted to find the one thing we could use to build a new category. In other words, software designed for salespeople and others who do contact work. Everywhere the brand name was used, the credentials were also used. In publicity, advertising, brochures, letterheads, calling cards. Even on the product box itself.

Today, Act has 70 percent of the contact software market and has become the dominant brand in the category. Credentials are particularly important in the publicity process. Reporters and editors are quick to dismiss advertising claims as puffery. If a reporter is doing a car-rental story, who is he or she likely to call first? Hertz, exactly. If a reporter is doing a cola story, he or she will almost always call Coca-Cola.

If a reporter is doing a computer software story, he or she will invariably call Microsoft. Many companies run branding programs almost devoid of credentials. While many of these benefits may be of general interest to prospective customers, they each lack credibility so they are generally ignored.

Early on, Datastream found itself with 32 percent of the market. Granted the market was small. Very, very small. No matter. Today, the market has exploded and Datastream still dominates the category. It truly is the leader in maintenance software.

Conventional thinking would have it otherwise. Forget leadership. We have to concentrate all of our efforts on selling the benefits of the category. There are also the long-term benefits of leadership. A widely publicized study of twenty-five leading brands in twenty-five different product categories in the year showed that twenty of the same twenty-five brands are still the leaders in their categories today.

In seventy-five years only five brands lost their leadership. Never assume that people know which brand is the leader. This is especially true in fast- growing, new categories like contact software and maintenance software. Most new prospects have no experience with the category and little knowledge of available brands, so they naturally gravitate to the leading brand. As the category matures, customers become more adventuresome and more willing to try different brands that offer seemingly unique advantages.

Leaders often have to write off the more sophisticated customers who will go out of their way not to buy the leading brand.

Write them off. Not all brands can be leaders, although every category offers a wealth of possibilities. Take beer, for example. If not, we created the credentials by inventing a new category. You see credentials at work in everyday life. How many times have you walked away from a new restaurant because it was almost empty?

Most people prefer to wait for a table at a restaurant that is crowded, rather than eat in an empty one. If this place was really good goes the thinking , there would be a line out the door. What is quality? Everybody thinks they can tell a high-quality product from a low-quality one, but in reality things are not always so obvious.

Does a Rolex keep better time than a Timex? Are you sure? Does a Leica take better pictures than a Pentax? Does a Mercedes have fewer mechanical problems than a Cadillac?

Does Hertz have better service than Alamo? Does a Montblanc pen write better than a Cross? Does Coca-Cola taste better than Pepsi-Cola? Most people seem to think so, because Coke outsells Pepsi. Yet in blind taste tests most people prefer the taste of Pepsi. Common wisdom blames the testing procedures.

If Coke outsells Pepsi, there must be something wrong with a taste test that shows the opposite. Quality is a concept that has thousands of adherents. The way to build a better brand, goes the thinking, is by building a better-quality product.

What seems so intuitively true in theory is not always so in practice. Building your brand on quality is like building your house on sand. You can build quality into your product, but that has little to do with your success in the marketplace. Years of observation have led us to this conclusion.

There is almost no correlation between success in the marketplace and success in comparative testing of brands—whether it be taste tests, accuracy tests, reliability tests, durability tests, or any other independent, objective third-party testing of brands.

Read Consumer Reports. You will find little correlation. In a recent ranking of sixteen brands of small cars, the number-one brand in quality was twelfth in sales. The number-two brand in quality was ninth in sales. The number-three brand in quality was dead last in sales.

Does quality matter? Most car buyers look for the best-quality car they can afford. But where does the concept of quality reside? In the showroom? Quality, or rather the perception of quality, resides in the mind of the buyer.

If you want to build a powerful brand, you have to build a powerful perception of quality in the mind. As it happens, the best way to build a quality perception in the mind is by following the laws of branding. Take the law of contraction. What happens when you narrow your focus? You become a specialist rather than a generalist. Does a cardiologist know more about the heart than a general practitioner of medicine? Most people think so. Certainly the perception is true.

Yet most companies want to be general practitioners. They want to expand the market for their products and services. And in doing so they violate the law of expansion. Another important aspect of brand building is having a better name.

All other factors being equal, the brand with the better name will come out on top. Being a specialist and having a better name go hand in hand.

Expanding a brand and being a generalist tend to destroy your ability to select a powerful name. There is much misinformation on this subject in business publications today. Omnibus brands are weak, not strong.

We know what you are thinking. But a weak brand can in fact be a sales success if it competes with even weaker brands. Take General Electric.

Who wins when two weak brands compete? A weak brand that just happens to be less weak than its competitor. When General Electric tried to compete in mainframe computers with a strong brand like IBM, the GE brand was a multimillion-dollar loser. When General Electric tried to compete in household appliances, the GE brand was no match for the specialists. Mile-wide brands like General Electric and General Motors look strong, but in reality are weak.

They look strong because they are well known and have been in business for decades. But when they go against the specialists, they are weak. Another factor in building a high-quality perception is having a high price. High price is a benefit to customers. It allows the affluent customer to obtain psychic satisfaction from the public purchase and consumption of a high-end brand. The customer who wears a Rolex watch does so to let other people know that he or she can afford to buy a Rolex watch.

And would they pay the same price if the label were on the inside of the jeans instead of on the outside? And what does the sommelier say to the restaurant customer who has just ordered an eighty- dollar bottle of wine?

Not likely. Even if the restaurant did have a twenty-dollar bottle that tasted just as good. And even if the customer believed the twenty-dollar bottle tasted just as good. Conventional wisdom often advocates marketing a high-quality product at a comparable price.

This is usually what is meant by a quality strategy. Quality is a nice thing to have, but brands are not built by quality alone. A better strategy in a sea of similar products with similar prices is to deliberately start with a higher price.

Then ask yourself, What can we put into our brand to justify the higher price? Rolex made its watches bigger and heavier with a unique-looking wristband. Callaway made its drivers oversized. Montblanc made its pens fatter. Chivas Regal let its Scotch whisky age longer. We always advise our clients to build as much quality into their brands as they can afford. Hey, it might save you money on service costs later on. To build a quality brand you need to narrow the focus and combine that narrow focus with a better name and a higher price.

According to the law of contraction a brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus. What happens when you narrow the focus to such a degree that there is no longer any market for the brand? This is potentially the best situation of all. What you have created is the opportunity to introduce a brand-new category. What was the market for an expensive vodka before Stolichnaya? Almost nothing. What was the market for expensive cars before Mercedes-Benz? What was the market for cheap cars before Volkswagen?

What was the market for in-line skates before Rollerblade? Branding is widely perceived as the process of capturing a bigger share of an existing market. The most efficient, most productive, most useful aspect of branding is creating a new category.

In other words, narrowing the focus to nothing and starting something totally new. To build a brand in a nonexisting category, to build something out of nothing, you have to do two things at once: You have to launch the brand in such a way as to create the perception that that brand was the first, the leader, the pioneer, or the original.

Invariably, you should use one of these words to describe your brand. You have to promote the new category. Easier, yes, but not as effective. When Apple introduced its ill-fated Newton, it forgot about the category name.

A notebook computer, a digital cell phone, or a digital watch can all be considered personal digital assistants. PDA did not distinguish the Newton from all those other personal digital assistants on the market. Callaway Golf outsells the next three brands combined. Yet the concept is simplicity itself. Of that total, 51 percent was spent for takeout or home delivery. Then make your brand name stand for the category the generic effect at the same time that you expand the category by promoting the benefits of the category, not the brand.

What are the benefits of takeout pizza? No waiters or waitresses. No delivery trucks. As a result Little Caesars can sell a pizza cheaper than its competition. Promote the category, not the brand. You are the only brand associated with the concept.

You have a powerful publicity platform. You need to put your branding dollars behind the concept itself, so the concept will take off, pulling the brand along with it. What happens when competition appears, as it inevitably does?

Leaders should continue to promote the category, to increase the size of the pie rather than their slice of the pie. Boston Chicken was a huge hit when it opened its doors. It was the first fast-food restaurant to focus on rotisserie chicken for the take-home dinner market. But instead of continuing to promote rotisserie chicken, it changed its name to Boston Market, added turkey, meatloaf, and ham to the menu, and fell into trouble. The rightful share of a leading brand is never more than 50 percent.

Instead of fighting competitive brands, a leader should fight competitive categories. Although it won a few million in its lawsuit, Polaroid effectively removed a competitor that could have greatly expanded the market. And what shampoo could be milder than a baby shampoo? If other baby shampoo brands had jumped on the adult bandwagon, sales might have gone even higher. Leading brands should promote the category, not the brand. The most important branding decision you will ever make is what to name your product or service.

Because in the long run a brand is nothing more than a name. In the short term, a brand needs a unique idea or concept to survive. It needs to be first in a new category. It needs to own a word in the mind. But in the long term, the unique idea or concept disappears. All that is left is the difference between your brand name and the brand names of your competitors. Xerox was the first plain-paper copier.

This unique idea built the powerful Xerox brand in the mind. But today all copiers are plain-paper copiers. The difference between brands is not in the products, but in the product names. Or rather the perception of the names. In the beginning it was easy to sell a Xerox copier.

All you had to do was show the difference between a Xerox copy and an ordinary copy. The Xerox copy was cleaner, sharper, and easier to read. The paper lay flat, felt better, and was much easier to handle and sort.

Today those differences are gone, but Xerox is still the best brand by far in the copier field. One reason is the name itself. The most valuable asset of the Xerox Corporation is the Xerox name itself. Yet marketers often disparage the importance of the name.

A name like Paper Master, on the other hand, helps us communicate the benefits of a better copier. On the other hand our firm, the Haloid Company, was founded in We have thousands of customers and a good reputation.

In futurespect, maybe you would. At least the vast majority of the companies we have worked with almost always prefer line-extended generic names to unique new brand names. On a global scale, this is the biggest issue in the business community. Companies are divided into two camps: those who believe that the essence of business success is in the continuing development of superior products and services, and those who believe in branding.

The product versus the brand. The product camp dominates the marketing scene. What counts is how the product performs. How does a Ricoh copier compare with a Sharp copier? Have you ever bought a copier? Which brand of copier is no good? Forget copiers. Which brands of any products are no good?

Sure, some people will dump on some brands. The no-good product is the red herring of marketing. It is constantly being used to justify the no- brand strategies of most companies. A company might own brands that might be called brands from a legal point of view in the sense that their names are registered trademarks. Product campers dominate the East Asia economy.

Virtually every Asian company uses a megabrand, master-brand, or line-extension strategy. Sixteen of the one hundred largest Japanese companies market products and services under the Mitsubishi name. Everything from automobiles to semiconductors to consumer electronics. From space equipment to transport systems.

Same problem as Mitsubishi. Eight of the one hundred largest Japanese companies market products and services under the Matsushita name. Everything from electric equipment to electronic products and components. From batteries to refrigeration equipment. Same problem as Matsushita. Eight of the one hundred largest Japanese companies market products and services under the Mitsui name. Compare Japan with the United States. Not that much difference. The real difference is in profits.

The one hundred American companies had profits on average of 6. The one hundred Japanese companies had profits on average of just 0. That 0. With so many companies close to the break- even point, you can be sure that many are losing money on a regular basis.