The essence of positioning is sacrifice.
AL RIESCustomers want brands that are narrow in scope and distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.
More Al Ries Quotes
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THE LAW OF THE CONTRACTION: A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus.
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Good things happen when you narrow your focus.
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When a really new product comes along, it’s almost always a mistake to hang a well-known name on it.
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An attribute that nobody else already owns in your category.
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It creates in the mind of the prospect the perception that there is no product on the market quite like your product.
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Positioning is not what you do to a product.
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Customers want brands that are narrow in scope and distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.
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Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.
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Only brand names register in the mind… What you should generally do is take a regular word and use it out of context to connote the primary attribute of your brand.
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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.
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Your brand’s power lies in dominance.
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The new product, if it’s going to be successful, is going to require a new name. New ladder, new name. It’s as simple as that.
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Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first overcommunicated society.
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It normally takes decades to build a brand… It’s the forgetting of the old truth that allows a person to accept a new truth.
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You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position.
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Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills.
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The Law of the Generic: One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a brand a generic name.
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But with a laser, you can drill a hole in a diamond or wipe out cancer.
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The best way to make news is to announce a new category, not a new product.
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You need to allow enough time for this forgetting to take place
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IBM didn’t invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect’s mind.
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It’s the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product.
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It takes a mile before anything happens. And if it was a wrong turn, getting back on course takes even longer.
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War and marketing have many similarities.
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A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer.
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It normally takes decades to build a brand because it takes decades to penetrate the gray matter in between your ears.
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