THE IMMUTABLE LAWS OF BRANDING
-Al Ries and Laura Ries
Marketers often confuse the power of brand with the sales generated by that brand. But sales are not just a function of your brand’s power. Sales are also a function of the strength or weakness of your competitor’s brand.
Line extension of ¥ Brand strength
products and services
A brand becomes stronger as it narrows its focus. Eg. Starbucks, Subway
Good things happen when you contract your brand.
Retail category killers follow a 5-step pattern:
- 1. Narrow the focus. Be a specialist rather than being a generic provider.
- 2. Stock in depth. Provide more variety or choices, as your product variation is very little.
- 3. Buy cheap. When you buy bulk for a single category you get stuff for cheap.
- 4. Sell cheap. When you buy cheap you can sell cheap while maintaining healthy margins.
- 5. Dominate the category. Try to create a monopoly.
If you want to be rich then you don’t have to copy what the rich are doing. But we should try and follow what they did before they got rich and what made them rich.
NARROW THE FOCUS!!!
Publicity is more necessary to create a brand, while maintaining a brand status is the job of advertisers. The news media wants to talk about what’s new, who’s first and what’s hot. Not, what’s better.
BRAND has to generate news to gain publicity and sometimes it is announcing a new category or a new product.
PUBLICITY ADVERTISING
What others say about you? What you say about yourself to others?
Hence, publicity is always more powerful, influential and impactful than
advertising. All big brands were created on the pages of general or
financial media not on bill boars or advertising.
Branding should be built from the publicity point of view and not from advertising point of view.
Advertising is like a nation’s defense system. It does not buy you anything but protects your market share from your competitors.
What should a brand leader advertise? Brand leadership, of course.
Advertising is a powerful tool, not to build leadership of fledging brand, but to maintain that leadership once it is obtained.
Advertising spent is purely of defensive nature. It will kill competition through larger media presence, for every time/everyplace possible.
Your brand owns the category name when people use your brand name generically.
Words are the key to brand building. Reality, of course, rests in a visual world of shapes, colours, textures and dimensions. But reality has no meaning without the concept provided by the human mind. The mind gives meaning to all visual reality.
So advertising has to be mainly targeted towards creating a favourable concept in the mind its consumer. You have to reduce the attributes of your brand/product to a single thought or word that no one else in the market owns.
NEVER FORGET LEADERSHIP!!!
What happens when you narrow your focus? You become a specialist rather than a generalist. People believe that the specialist has far better knowledge of quality than a generalist.
Branding is not a process of capturing a bigger share of existing market. The most efficient, most productive, most useful aspect of branding is creating a new category.
Ways to build a brand in a non-existing category:
- You have to launch the brand in such a way as to create the perception that the brand is a pioneer, a leader, the first or original. Invariably, we should use these words to describe our brand.
- We have to promote the new category.
Leading brands should promote the category not the brands.
When you expand a brand, you reduce its power as a brand. When you contract, you increase its power.
The easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its name on everything.
In order to build a category, brands should welcome other brands. Competition between two brands creates more awareness for the customer. The demand of the category grows up.
Market share is not based on merit, but on the power of the brand in the mind. In the longer run, a brand is not necessarily a higher-quality product, but a higher-quality name.
One of the fastest routes to failure is giving brand a generic name.
A good brand is not just a visually different one but also verbally.
What you should do is find a regular word taken out of context and used to connote the primary attribute of your brand.
Corporate endorsements are for trade, not for consumer enlightenment. Consumers buy brands not corporations. Management should constantly remind themselves that the customer cares only for the brands not the companies.
A good BRAND is a product by itself.
Short names greatly improve your word of mouth publicity possibilities.
What branding builds, sub-branding can destroy.
The essence of a brand is some idea or attribute or market segment you can own in the mind.
A logotype should be like a windshield, roughly two and one-fourths units wide and one unit high.
This horizontal shape will provide the maximum impact for your logotype.
The power of a brand name lies in the meaning of the word in the mind. For most brands, a symbol/logo has little or nothing to do with creating this meaning in the mind.
For a global brand.
Every country has its own unique perception. When a brand is in sync with its own country’s perceptions, the brand has the possibility of becoming a global brand.
Limitations (focus) combined with consistency (over decades, not years) is what builds a brand.
Brand changing does not occur inside the company. It occurs inside the mind of the consumer.
No brand will live forever. Euthanasia is the best solution.
Most brands belong to a generation or two.
The most important aspect of a brand is its single mindedness.
What’s a brand?
A proper noun that can be used in place of a common word or a particular product for a specific utility.
A singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of the prospect/customer.
