“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.”

IBM didn’t invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect’s mind.

It takes a mile before anything happens. And if it was a wrong turn, getting back on course takes even longer.

Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills.

The essence of positioning is sacrifice.

Strategy should evolve out of the mud of the marketplace, not in the antiseptic environment of an ivory tower.

Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things.

Customers want brands that are narrow in scope and distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.

The Law of the Generic: One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a brand a generic name.

Marketing is not selling. Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the prospect.

It normally takes decades to build a brand because it takes decades to penetrate the gray matter in between your ears.

Successful brands get into the mind slowly. A blurb in a magazine. A mention in a newspaper. A comment from a friend. A display in a retail store.

After a slow buildup, people become convinced that they have known about the brand forever.

You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position.

What’s your brand? If you can’t answer that question about your own brand in two or three words, your brand’s in trouble.

Each year we send more and receive less.

The next generation product almost never comes from the previous generation.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you, somewhere else I am saying I never want to be without you again.

If nothing else, I have money.

When all else fails…be a rockstar

He’s going on and on and on, and finally he stops. It’s just total horror, and the camera’s still rolling. You can hear it, sort of a grinding noise. And the director says, “Anything else, Bud?”

The idea of a future without her wasn’t to be borne. She had by some mysterious metamorphosis become more beautiful than anyone else he had ever encountered.

I get a heavy penance for something I couldn’t help doing. But good or bad, I am a Catholic and I’ll never be anything else.

There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren’t watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.

While I was growing up, I believed I could do anything I could think of. So the challenge was always to keep thinking – to get to where I wanted to be and then to think of somewhere else to go.