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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Al Ries
Read between
February 22 - March 2, 2019
What is branding? From a business point of view, branding in the marketplace is very similar to branding on the ranch. A branding program should be designed to differentiate your product from all the other cattle on the range. Even if all the other cattle on the range look pretty much alike. Successful branding programs are based on the concept of singularity. The objective is to create in the mind of the prospect the perception that there is no other product on the market quite like your product.
Marketing is brand building. The two concepts are so inextricably linked that it’s impossible to separate them. Furthermore, since everything a company does can contribute to the brand-building process, marketing is not a function that can be considered in isolation. Marketing is what a company is in business to do. Marketing is a company’s ultimate objective. That’s why everyone who works in a corporation should be concerned with marketing, and specifically, with the laws of branding. If the entire company is the marketing department, then the entire company is the branding department.
As illogical as it might seem, we can visualize a time when the marketing concept itself will become obsolete, to be replaced by a new concept called “branding.”
What is accelerating this trend is the decline of selling. Selling, as a profession and as a function, is slowly sinking like the Titanic. Today most products and services are bought, not sold. And branding greatly facilitates this process. Branding “pre-sells” the product or se...
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That old expression “Nothing happens until somebody sells something” is being replaced by today’s slogan, “Nothing happen...
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A brand name is nothing but a word in the mind, albeit a special kind of word. A brand name is a noun, a proper noun, which like all proper nouns is usually spelled with a capital letter. Any and every proper noun is a brand, whether it’s owned by an individual, a corporation, or a community. Patagonia is a brand name for a clothing line, but it’s also a brand name for the tourist industries of Argentina and Chile interested in promoting travel to this pristine and beautiful place. Philadelphia is a brand name for the leading cream cheese, but it’s also a brand name for the City of Brotherly
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The Internet is the ultimate in brand-centered buying. Consumers are purchasing automobiles from Websites without ever seeing the cars or going for a test drive.
1 THE LAW OF EXPANSION The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope.
Customers want brands that are narrow in scope and are distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.
Marketers often confuse the power of a brand with the sales generated by that brand. But sales are not just a function of a brand’s power. Sales are also a function of the strength or weakness of a brand’s competition.
If your competition is weak or nonexistent, you can often increase sales by weakening your brand. That is, by expanding it over more segments of the market. You can therefore draw the conclusion that line extension works. But in so doing, the only thing you have demonstrated is the weakness of the competition. Coca-Cola had nothing to lose when it launched Diet Coke, because the competition (Pepsi-Cola) also had a line-extended product called Diet Pepsi. While extending the line might bring added sales in the short term, it runs counter to the notion of branding. If you want to build a
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2 THE LAW OF CONTRACTION A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus.
Good things happen when you contract rather than expand your business. Most retail category killers follow the same five-step pattern. Narrow the focus. A powerful branding program always starts by contracting the category, not expanding it. Stock in depth. A typical Toys “R” Us store carries 10,000 toys versus 3,000 toys for a large department store. Buy cheap. Toys “R” Us makes its money buying toys, not selling toys. Sell cheap. When you can buy cheap, you can sell cheap and still maintain good margins. Dominate the category. The ultimate objective of any branding program is to dominate a
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When you dominate a category, you become extremely powerful. Microsoft has 95 percent of the worldwide market for desktop computer operating systems. Intel has 80 percent of the worldwide market for microprocessors. Coca-Cola has 70 percent of the worldwide market for cola. And in order to dominate a category, you must narrow your brand’s focus.
Most people search for success in all the wrong places. They try to find out what rich and successful companies are currently doing and then try to copy them.
If you want to be rich, you have to do what rich people did before they were rich—you have to find out what they did to become rich. If you want to have a successful company, you have to do what successful companies did before they were successful.
Good things happen when you narrow the focus.
3 THE LAW OF PUBLICITY The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising.
Today brands are born, not made. A new brand must be capable of generating favorable publicity in the media or it won’t have a chance in the marketplace.
And just how do you generate publicity? The best way to generate publicity is by being first. In other words, by being the first brand in a new category.
4 THE LAW OF ADVERTISING Once born, a brand needs advertising to stay healthy.
Leaders should not look on their advertising budgets as investments that will pay dividends. Instead leaders should look on their advertising budgets as insurance that will protect them against losses caused by competitive attacks.
5 THE LAW OF THE WORD A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer.
If you want to build a brand, you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind. A word that nobody else owns.
To be successful in branding a “prestige” product or service, you need to do two things: You need to make your product or service more expensive than the competition. You need to find a code word for prestige.
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.
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.
6 THE LAW OF CREDENTIALS The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity.
When you don’t have the leading brand, your best strategy is to create a new category in which you can claim leadership.
7 THE LAW OF QUALITY Quality is important, but brands are not built by quality alone.
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,
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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.
Not likely. Quality is a nice thing to have, but brands are not built by quality alone.
To build a quality brand you need to narrow the focus and combine that narrow focus with a better name and a higher price.
8 THE LAW OF THE CATEGORY A leading brand should promote the category, not the brand.
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.
9 THE LAW OF THE NAME In the long run a brand is nothing more than a name.
10 THE LAW OF EXTENSIONS The easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its name on everything.
11 THE LAW OF FELLOWSHIP In order to build the category, a brand should welcome other brands.
12 THE LAW OF THE GENERIC One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a brand a generic name.
13 THE LAW OF THE COMPANY Brands are brands. Companies are companies. There is a difference.
14 THE LAW OF SUBBRANDS What branding builds, subbranding can destroy.
15 THE LAW OF SIBLINGS There is a time and a place to launch a second brand.
16 THE LAW OF SHAPE A brand’s logotype should be designed to fit the eyes. Both eyes.
The power of a brand name lies in the meaning of the word in the mind. For most brands, a symbol has little or nothing to do with creating this meaning in the mind.
17 THE LAW OF COLOR A brand should use a color that is the opposite of its major competitor’s.
18 THE LAW OF BORDERS There are no barriers to global branding. A brand should know no borders.
19 THE LAW OF CONSISTENCY A brand is not built overnight. Success is measured in decades, not years.
20 THE LAW OF CHANGE Brands can be changed, but only infrequently and only very carefully.
