The 22 Immutable
Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout.
Law 1 (law of leadership)
Being
first in the market is better than having a better product.
Examples:
we all
remember who first flew over Atlantic or who was the first man on the moon
but almost no-one knows who was the second
Heineken
was the first imported beer in USA and still is No. 1 imported beer
same
for Miller Lite, first domestic light beer
Being
first doesn't matter if the idea/product is not good.
In other
words: being first gives you very big advantage over competition but doesn't
guarantee success. It doesn't matter that you're first to market if no-one
needs your product or if your product is very bad. Computer industry has
counter-examples (first spreadsheet isn't the dominant spreadsheet, first word
processor isn't the dominant word processor) so you can overcome first-mover
advantage, but it's very hard and requires the leader to make big mistakes.
Law 2 (law of category)
It's hard
to gain leadership in a category with a lot of competition.
It's
better to create a productin new category.
Category
doesn't have to be radically different, e.g. if there's dominant player in
imported beer you can become the first to import light beer. If you can't be
the first to fly over Atlantic, you can still be the first woman to fly over
Atlantic.
Law 3 (law of mind)
It's not
important to be first in the market but first in the mind of consumers.
One way to
get mind-share is to out-advertise earlier competitor.
Law 4 (law of perception)
Marketing
is not about products (their features or quality) but about perceptions (how
people perceive products).
Reality
doesn't exists. What we call "reality" is just a perception of
reality that we create in our minds.
Honda is a
leading Japanese car manufacturer in US but only third in Japan (after Toyota
and Nissan). If the quality of the car was the most important thing it should
have the same position in all markets.
In Japan
people perceive Honda as a manufacturer of motorcycles.
Marketing
should be focused on changing the perception.
I have
mixed feelings about this. You can't separate perception from reality too much.
You can market Honda Civic as luxury car. BMW is marketed as luxury car but
it's also superior to Honda Civic.
Law 5 (law of focus)
The most
powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect's mind.
Owning in
this context means that if people hear or see this word they usually connect it
with a company that "owns" this word. IBM owns "computer".
FedEx owns "overnight".
You can't
take somebody else's word
This only
applies to biggest companies, not small or medium-sized businesses.
Law 6 (law of exclusivity)
It's
fruitless to try to take over a word that is already owned by a competitor.
Burger
King tried to own word "fast" which was already owned by McDonald.
They failed miserably.
FedEx
tried to take over "worldwide" from DHL.
Law 7 (law of the ladder)
Marketing
strategy depends on your position in the market.
No. 2
company uses different strategy than No. 1 or 3.
Avis was
No. 2 in car rental and when they advertised as "finest in
rent-a-cars" they had losses because their marketing wasn't credible (you
can't be "finest" being No. 2).
They
turned profit when they switched to "Avis is only No. 2 in rent-a-cars. So
why go with us? We try harder".
Then they
had another disastrous marketing campaign when they started claiming "Avis
is going to be No. 1".
I agree
with the premise (kind of marketing depends on your position in the market).
However the book says very little about what kind of strategy one should use in
a given position (except for a few examples).
Law 8 (law of duality)
In the
long run, every market becomes a two-horse race. McDonald & Burger King.
Coca-Cola & Pepsi. Nike & Reebok. Crest & Colgate.
There are
many counter-examples to this (movie studios, car companies). Also, how knowing
this helps marketing person? There's little a marketer can do about the
position of his company in the market. The only conclusion I can make is that
if I were a marketing person and worked for No. 3 company, I should quit and
apply for a job in No. 2 or 1.
Law 9 (law of opposite)
If you're
shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader.
Leverage
the leader's strength into a weakness.
Don't try
to be better than the leader, try to be different.
E.g. Pepsi
marketed itself as a "choice for the new generation" when faced with
Coca-cola's "old and established" brand.
Sounds
correct although doesn't apply to those who do have ambitions to overtake the
leader (e.g. Excel killed Lotus 1-2-3 by being a better spreadsheet, not a
different spreadsheet).
Law 10 (law of division)
Over time
a category will split into two or more categories.
E.g.
computers started as a single category but broke up into mainframes,
workstations, personal computers, laptops etc.
Cars
started as a single category but divided into luxury cars, sport cars, RVs,
minivans etc.
Companies
often don't understand that and instead think that categories are combining,
believe in synergy.
Leader can
maintain dominance by addressing emerging categories with new brand names
instead of using brand name successful in one category in a new category.
E.g. when
Honda wanted to go up-market it created a new brand, Acura.
Law 11 (law of perspective)
Marketing
effects take place over an extended period of time. It's a mistake to sacrifice
long-term planning with actions that improve short-term balance sheet.
E.g. a
sale increases short-term profits but in the long-term educates people not to
buy for regular price, therefore decreasing long-term profits.
Law 12 (law of extension)
There's an
irresistible pressure to extend the equity of the brand and it's a mistake.
Instead
one should create new brands to address new markets/products.
Here
authors predict (in 1993) that Microsoft will fail because they use this
unhealthy strategy of extending their brand to new products. 14 years later and
Microsoft is still going strong.
Law 13 (law of sacrifice)
You have
to give up something in order to get something. There are three things to
sacrifice:
product
line
target
market
constant
change
Law 14 (law of attributes)
For every
attribute, there is an opposite, effective attribute.
You can't
own the same word as the competition. You have to find another word to own,
another attribute.
Law 15 (law of candor)
When you
admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive. Candor is disarming.
It's ok to admit, as Avis did, that "Avis is only No. 2 in
rent-a-cars".
Law 16 (law of singularity)
In each
situation, only one move will produce substantial results.
People
tend to think that success is the result of a lot of small efforts well
executed, that working harder is a way to success.
In
marketing the only thing that works is a single, bold stroke.
Law 17 (law of predictability)
Unless you
write your competitors' plans, you can't predict the future.
You don't
know the future, you don't know what your competition will do so you have to
build your company and marketing strategies to be flexible, to be able to
quickly respond to changing situation.
Law 18 (law of success)
Success
often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure.
Don't be
arrogant, drop the ego, be objective.
Law 19 (law of failure)
Failure is
to be expected and accepted.
Drop
things that don't work instead of trying to fix them.
Don't
punish for failures. If you do, people will stop taking risks.
Law 20 (law of hype)
The
situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press.
The amount
of hype isn't proportional to success. Often failed products are heavily hyped.
Law 21 (law of acceleration)
Successful
programs are not built on fads but on trends.
Law 22 (law of resources)
Without
adequate funding an idea won't get off the ground. You need a lot of money to
market your ideas.
On one
hand you can read it as a "don't fool yourself" advice. On the other
hand authors promote indiscriminate spending of money on advertising without
mentioning that sometimes advertisement doesn't pay. It seems obvious that you
should never spend more on marketing that you can hope to get out of it from
increased revenues, yet the books never says that. It just asserts that you
need to spend a lot on marketing. A suspicious advice coming from people who
sell marketing.
Summary
How one
should judge a book on marketing? If the book gives information that allows you
to do better marketing, then it's a good marketing book.
In my
opinion "The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing" fails in that respect.
Their examples that illustrate the laws are taken from the relatively small
pool of the biggest companies in the world. It's not evident that the same
rules apply to small (or medium) businesses.
The advice
is frequently not helpful, e.g. "make sure your program deals
realistically with your position on the ladder". Well, thanks guys, but
how exactly?
A very
frequent flaw of this book is its use of selective examples to illustrate their
laws.
If I can
choose my examples I can make any laws I want - there will always be an example
that support my "law". The problem is that there might be 100
counter-examples that I won't mention.
I can
understand that providing counter-examples isn't something that authors were
interested in, that a rule that is only correct in 80% of the cases is still a
very useful rule, that not talking about every possibility can improve the
clarity of exposition ("A little inaccuracy can save tons of explanation")
but I got the impression that author's way of choosing examples was based on
"whatever seems to confirm what we say" principle.
And never forget:
Marketing is the science of convincing us that What You Get Is
What You Want. -- John Carter
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Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience
They key to life is not not caring, it’s choosing what you care about and not giving a fuck about anything else
The desire for a positive experience is itself a negative experience
Pursuing things only reinforces that you lack it
The best thing you can do to be happy is accept your current experience of life as wonderful
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” -Albert Camus
Everything good in life comes from overcoming a negative
If you embrace or even enjoy the pain associated with achieving your goals, you become unstoppable
The moments where you don’t give a fuck and take action are life-defining
Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck is not about being indifferent. It just means you’re comfortable with being different. Don’t say fuck it to everything in life, just to the unimportant things
Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first care about something more important than adversity
Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about. The key is to gradually prune the things you care about, so that you only give a fuck on the most important of occasions
Evolution taught us to be unhappy so that we’d always be striving. Whenever there is calm, the mind invents unhappiness
What most people — especially educated, pampered middle-class white people — consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about
Finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy
There is no value in suffering when it is done without purpose
Don’t hope for a life without problems. Hope for a life with good problems
Problems never stop. They merely get exchanged or upgraded
Happiness is found in solving problems, not avoiding them
You can’t merely be in love with the result. Everybody loves the result. You have to love the process
Self-esteem, by itself, is overrated. It doesn’t help to feel good about yourself unless you have a good reason for feeling that way. The struggle makes self-esteem useful, not the participation trophy
Your problems are not privileged in their severity or pain. You are not unique in your suffering
Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience. The best of the best, worst of the worst, and most upsetting of the upsetting. We only see the most exceptional news stories because that’s what drives revenue. This is a real problem when it comes to comparison because you can only be exceptional in one thing thing and you’re going to be below average in nearly everything else. That makes comparison a very dangerous game to play
The more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true
“Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose.”
People will often fight over who gets to be responsible for successful and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important because that’s where real learning comes from
You have to own your own problems. It’s empowering.
Entitlement is where you feel you deserve happiness, and that others are failing if they’re not giving it to you
Certainty is the enemy of growth
Manson’s Law of Avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. The more something threatens how you view yourself, the more you will avoid getting around to doing it
Manson’s idea of “kill yourself” is similar to Paul Graham’s idea of “keep your identity small.” The central point is that if you don’t have an identity to protect, then change becomes much easier
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle
If it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself
Goals are limited in the amount of happiness they can provide in our lives because they are finite. Once you achieve the goal, it can no longer provide happiness because the finish line has been crossed. Paradoxically, then, by choosing processes as your focus, you can increase your overall, lifelong happiness by focusing on the process and not the goal. Processes never end, which means happiness can continue indefinitely
To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There’s a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives
The mark of an unhealthy relationship is when two people try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves
Investing deeply in one person, one place, one job, one activity might deny us the breadth of experience we’d like, but pursuing a breadth of experience denies us the opportunity to enjoy the rewards of depth of experience
Rejection of alternatives liberates us. In a strange way, commitment to one thing offers more freedom than anything else because it relieves you of all the second guessing about what else is out there
If there is no reason to do anything, if life is pointless, then there is also no reason to not do anything. What do you have to lose? You’re going to die anyway, so your fears and embarrassments and failures don’t mean anything. You might as well try
All of the meaning in our life is shaped by our innate desire to never truly die. Our physical bodies will die, but we cling to the idea that we can live on through religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation
The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself, to contribute to some much larger entity
It is the act of choosing your values and living by them that makes you great, not any outcome or accomplishment
Thoughts
There is still an inherent contradiction in working to make yourself better when self-improvement as a goal still means you’re chasing something
I am not sure what this does to one’s desire not to die. I think it merely shows that the focus should be on living on through helping others and being part of something bigger. And that if you’re merely focusing on saving your own actual identity then that’s probably a limited and selfish goal that will only lead to the problems described above
Lessons
Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience.
Not giving a fuck works in reverse. If pursuing the positive is a negative, then pursuing the negative generates the positive. The pain you pursue in the gym results in better all-around health and energy.
Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously, I could keep going, but you get the point. Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame
