I recently finished reading The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, a book that I found to be both fascinating and eye-opening. Even though it is quite dated – it’s from 1993, and you can tell! – most of the suggestions are still highly relevant. The twenty-two laws are the laws of:
Leadership, the Category, the Mind, Perception, Focus, Exclusivity, the Ladder, Duality, the Opposite, Division, Perspective, Line Extension, Sacrifice, Attributes, Candor, Singularity, Unpredictability, Success,Failure, Hype, Acceleration, Resources.
Naturally, I won’t be able to cover all of them in this blog entry, but let me go through a couple of examples to highlight the points that really resonated with me.
Let’s take the first two laws, regarding Leadership and the Category, for example. In these two laws, we learn that to truly reach out to your audience and to capture their attention, you need to be the first. It’s not enough to just copy somebody who is already doing a good job, you have to be the first one out there. If you can’t be first, then find a new category within that group to be in. Charles Lindberg was the first person to fly across the Atlantic, but nobody remembers the second person to do so, even though the second person to do it actually did a far better job of it. However, everybody knows the third person – Amelia Earhart – because she was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.
Another important law is the Law of Duality. You have to set your self up to have an opponent or a reasonable opposite. It may seem strange and counter-intuitive at first, but it doesn’t make sense to market your new drink as “the best drink in the world”. No company in their right mind would want to take a contrary position and market theirs as the worst. Instead, you want to find a feature that one can take an opposite point of and market your drink as, for example, the most sugary drink, the saltiest drink, the most caffinated drink, or something on those lines.
The Law of Line Extension is equally interesting. It tells you, basically, to find one thing to be good at and stick to it. Too many companies have failed because they’ve tried to expand their horizons too wide and tried to do too much. IBM is a perfect example of this, but there are plenty of others. If you have a brand name that’s closely associated with frozen foods, don’t try to expand your business into drinks and plastic utensils. If you really feel there’s a market for these things, use completely different brand names so that people won’t make the connection.
It’s a great book, and definitely one that I would recommend to anybody that is interested in marketing.
On a side note, this blog may experience some slow update times over the next two weeks. I’m flying off to Tunisia tomorrow and will be going straight to South Africa from there. I’ll try to write something from there, but I can’t be sure if I have the time, energy or motivation. We’ll see.
