The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service Into a World-Class Brand

By: Al Ries, Laura Ries

This is an excellent book for anyone that wants to learn about branding.

Quick and easy read, which makes it a must for any professionals working in any areas that are closely related to branding or marketing.

A great complement to the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

Flow: 5/5, can be read in a few days.

Actionability: 4/5, not many step by step instructions but there is still a lot of actionable advice.

Mindset: 4/5, will change the way you think about branding.

Some Of My Highlights:

  • “Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the prospect.”

  • “Today most products and services are bought, not sold. And branding greatly facilitates this process.”

  • “Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things.”

  • “Aim high. You can never achieve more than you aspire to.”

  • “If you want to have a successful company, you have to do what successful companies did before they were successful. As it happens, they all did the same thing. They narrowed their focus.”

  • “While a hefty advertising budget might be needed to maintain high-flying brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, advertising generally won’t get a new brand off the ground.”

  • “When your brand can make news, it has a chance to generate publicity. And the best way to make news is to announce a new category, not a new product.”

  • “If you want to build a brand, you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind.”

  • “To get into the consumer’s mind you have to sacrifice. You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute. An attribute that nobody else already owns in your category.”

  • “Quality, or rather the perception of quality, resides n the mind of the buyer.”

  • “There is almost no correlation between success in the marketplace and success in comparative testing of brands – whether it be taste tests, accuracy tests, reliability tests, durability tests, or any other independent, objective third-party testing of brands.”

  • “To build a quality brand you need to narrow the focus and combine that narrow focus with a better name and a higher price.”

  • “The most efficient, most productive, most useful aspect of branding is creating a new category.”

  • “Leaders should continue to promote the category, to increase the size of the pie rather than their slice of the pie.”

  • “Leading brands should promote the category, not the brand.”