The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is an essential business book that outlines the constants when it comes to establishing your company’s position.
Law 1 – The Law of Leadership
To get someone to unlearn something is harder than to get them to learn something new. Find a niche, get there first, otherwise, you will face an uphill battle. Everyone remembers the first man on the moon, no one remembers the second. There are many examples in history of brands who were able to maintain their market position because they were there first. (Harvard, Miller Beer, IBM, Tide, Gillette). One reason this happens is that the name becomes generic. People will ask for Kleenex regardless of what brand the box of tissue paper is.
Law 2 – The Law of Category
The idea here is to create a new category for yourself. Since it’s unlikely that you’re the pioneer of any major industry, the best move to do would be to find out where you can be a pioneer. If you’re not the first beer, then try to become the first local beer. If you’re not the first local beer, then try to become the first light local beer.
Law 3 – The Law of the Mind
It’s possible for a company to be first in an industry but not first in consumers’ minds. One example is the early personal computer days when Apple’s competitors had difficult names such as “Commodore Pet, IMSAI 8080, MITS Altair 8800, and Radio Shack TRS-80”. Once you make that first impression, there’s no going back. It’ll be hard to undo what you already did, if not impossible.
Law 4 – The Law of Perception
In any competitive market, a certain level of quality will be achieved, and knowing what makes each product truly superior or inferior after that level has been achieved becomes very difficult. Since we know that the same automobile markets with the same prices and characteristics exist all over the world, we might expect the same market leader to emerge every time.
But that isn’t the case. The top car in Japan is not the top car in the US. What this proves is that customers are not objective evaluators of cars, but rather, they are subject to their cultural biases. The best car company in Japan is the one that won over the Japanese cultural perception. It’s easy to get bogged down by the details of your product and how it has slightly superior features to a competitor’s product, but the real battle that must be fought is a marketing battle. Building a quality product will get you in the game, but it’s your marketing that will determine whether you end up a winner or a loser.
Law 5 – The Law of Focus
The idea of focus is to find your niche, and immediately after that, take the initiative to own a word that is most suitable for the category you’re in. Heinz did that with “slowest”, BMW did that with “driving”, Pepsi-Cola did that with “youth”. If you don’t happen to be the leader in your category, then you need to find a word that works. Not every kind of word works. For example, the word “quality” often doesn’t work, because it’s used by everyone. You can’t have an “un-quality” product. Well, you can, but no one would buy it. It’s a fair argument, but it can’t be applied to everything. For example, you can’t have an “undriving” car either. But you can target the old. Having focus also means not being everything to everyone. If you want to be everything to everyone, then you are not something to anyone. Own a word, but don’t own all the words.
Law 6 – The Law of Exclusivity
If someone else in your industry owns a word already, don’t try to own it too. Customers cannot associate the same word to two different companies in the same space. In the fast food industry, McDonald’s owned the word fast. However, Burger King, knowing that “fast” was the most obvious sell when it came to fast food, paid for multiple campaigns that tried to relay the “fast” message. They all failed, and their ad agency was fired. The moral here is that they should have positioned as the opposite of that, or something else entirely. This takes us back to the idea that it is not possible to undo perceptions in people’s minds. Once an idea has been implanted, there is little use in removing it. The best you can do is occupy a new space.
Law 7 – The Law of the Ladder
Some products that are frequently are in industries that have a lot of competitors. Other products that are infrequently used are in industries with few competitors. Whatever industry you’re in, you ought to be aware of the space you occupy in the hierarchy. Avis tried for 12 years to market itself as the best, but it failed, and lost money. The second it admitted to being number two with the famous line ““Avis is only No. 2 in rent-a-cars. So why go with us? We try
Harder”, Their sales picked dramatically picked up. A random high school can’t market itself as the “Harvard” of anything, people won’t take it seriously. Instead, it should find a new angle that works for it. There is no sense in trying to ignore reality, it’s a lot more useful to acknowledge reality and make it work for you. This also relates to the Law of Candor.
Law 8 – The Law of Duality
When a new market is established, and multiple products exist, customers will pick the third or fourth leading product. But once enough time has passed, the same situation always ensues, the market leaders emerge. Customers at this point start to believe that the leading brands must be the ones offering the highest quality products, and this propagates a two-horse race situation that can be seen across many industries (McDonald’s vs Burger King, Hertz vs Avis, Crest vs Colgate).
Law 9 – The Law of the Opposite
When Burger King launched advertising campaigns that acknowledged McDonald’s leadership position and claimed to have better products (Whopper vs Big Mac), they did better. When they stopped focusing on being the opposite of McDonald’s (herbal ad campaigns) or targeted segments McDonald’s owned (kids), they failed miserably. The No.2 brand should always focus its efforts on positioning counter to the No. 1 brand for best results.
Law 14 – The Law of Attributes
The idea here is that if you own a word like big, you shouldn’t laugh at your competitors who own the opposite word, like small. It might work perfectly against you. For IBM that’s exactly what happened. The authors suggest that Burger King should have done just that to fight McDonald’s fast, young dominance.
Law 15: The Law of Candor
Candor, or honesty, can disarm your detractors. Every negative statement you make about yourself is instantly accepted as truth. Positive statements you make about yourself are under constant suspicion – especially in an ad. You have to prove a positive statement to the prospect’s satisfaction. No proof is needed for a negative statement.
Law 16: The Law of Singularity
What works in military is what works in marketing, the unexpected. It’s not about trying out a million different tactics, it’s a singular focused bold strategy that works. Coke “The real thing” a lot more powerful than a million other tactics that could have been used. Find out where the opponent is weak and strike there. Launching new products could undermine the word that you own in the mind of your customers. New coke in this case. Better to stick with one powerful script. Auto industry is like that. Germans and Japanese launched high-end and low-end
attacks. Respondents need to find a way that works in response. In other words, marketing is about studying the market, it’s about knowing what others are doing and taking note of what’s working and what isn’t. It’s dynamic.
Law 17: The Law of Unpredictability
Don’t try to predict future trends, it’s not possible. You can make small bets about the future, but you can’t know what specifically is going to be popular. The best strategy is to be flexible enough to change based on market conditions. Rigidity is a crutch and has cost companies (like GM) in the past and will likely cost many more in the future.
Law 18: The Law of Success
Being successful can get into your head and cloud your judgement. Some people might attribute success to their brand when in fact, it was their sound business execution that lead them to success. So, they start to get lazy and think that they can just put their brand on anything and find success. Marketing isn’t about how you see the world, it’s about how the customer sees it. To stay in tune with what the customer thinks and perceives, you need to stay humble and constantly pay attention to what’s going on.
Law 20: The Law of Hype
Beware the hype. Throughout history, many industries were thought to have been going through a revolution. Most of these revolutions took many years to materialize and some completely disappeared. Real revolutions are never on the front-page headlines, they’re what’s going on behind the scenes and will show up when you least expect it. Salesmanship and a lot of marketing dollars often mask the underlying problems with some of these revolutions, such as the pen computer revolution or the video camera revolution decades ago. Some of these products may have had markets, but rarely are we able to see revolutions that happen on mass scale too early.
Law 21: The Law of Acceleration
There’s a difference between a fad and a trend. A trend is long lasting while a fad is short lasting. That doesn’t mean they’re made of different stuff, in fact, it’s possible and advisable to turn a fad into a trend. A fad that is fanned and accelerated will wear off quickly, but a fad that is “dampened” or restricted, will remain for a longer period. The barbie doll was a trend that has lasted a long time because it didn’t permeate other categories, while ninja turtle toys overextended and as a result died out. A fashion is just the resuscitation of old fads.
The purpose of a law – I would assume – is to increase your chances of success if you follow it. But the laws are more like representations of what happens in a market over time, and what can generally be perceived. The book might be more accurately called “The 22 Laws of Markets”. Of course, any marketeer can benefit from the laws in the book, but some don’t seem to be laws at all.
Take the Law of Hype; there are many cases of front page headlines that turned into revolutions. Since hype is generated around almost anything interesting, a lot of the projects that were hyped up amount to nothing, but some of the projects that were hyped up end up changing the world.
As an example of a law that doesn’t make much sense in the world of business, take the Law of Division. “over time, a category will divide into two or more categories”. It firsts starts off as an observation that any single category will over time develop subcategories. Fair enough. Then there’s a warning that companies shouldn’t spread their focus, otherwise they risk ruining their perception. But, of course, many conglomerates thrive precisely because they’ve spread their bets – so to speak. Some businesses, especially smaller ones, should stick to a single category to survive, but larger companies often need to expand in order to maintain their growth.
My main criticism is that not enough thought is given to counter-examples in the book. Many of the laws are, in fact, not immutable. And many prescriptions will work for some companies and not others, and in some cases and not in others. What the authors seem to have done is take a bunch of examples from history that revolve around a common theme, and presume that a higher order law governs them. It’s a messy way of reasoning through induction. There is no clear basis for which companies were selected, over what time period, in which countries, of what size, and in what industries.
This is one of the most talked about books in marketing. Whether you’re a marketer, entrepreneur, or author, you can benefit from the examples of the past to avoid making the same strategic errors businesses have made and find out how to leverage your position properly.
If you’re an entrepreneur and you want a quick guide to know what to think about before launching you business, check out The Myth of Entrepreneurship.