“The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity.”

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.

What should a brand leader advertise?

Advertising is the way great brands get to be great brands.

It takes a lot of courage to be the same person on the outside that you are on the inside.

I try to make music with emotion and integrity. And authenticity.

Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

Jorge Luis Borges was lamenting a variety of Orientalism that was used to measure the alleged authenticity of Argentine and Latin American writers in the midcentury.

Our primordial purpose is to respond to the impulsion from within to solve the mystery of our individual existence, to find and be the authentic Self that is, has been and ever shall be.

Get naked with your truth, offering the world your greatest gift: your authentic self.

Never let anyone mask their misbehavior towards you as authenticity.

If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.