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

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.

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’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.

That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.

It creates in the mind of the prospect the perception that there is no product on the market quite like your product.

Even if all the cattle on the range look pretty much alike.

You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit.

In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.

Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities.

Even when all is known, the care of a man is not yet complete, because eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise. For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health.

You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel.

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.