Al Ries > Quotes

“Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

“The only reality you can be sure about is in your own perceptions. If the universe exists, it exists inside your own mind and the minds of others.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

“The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.”
― Al Reis, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“A perception that exists in the mind is often interpreted as a universal truth.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk

“Don't play semantic games with the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It's a seduction.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“The mind, as a defense against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“The single most wasteful thing you can do in marketing is try to change a mind.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

“Too often, however, greed gets confused with positioning thinking. Charging high prices is not the way to get rich. Being the first to (1) establish the high-price position (2) with a valid product story (3) in a category where consumers are receptive to a high-priced brand is the secret of success. Otherwise, your high price just drives prospective customers away.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“When you try to be everything, you wind up being nothing.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“Today brands are born, not made. A new brand must be capable of generating favorable publicity in the media or it won’t have a chance in the marketplace.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand

“Mind-changing is the road to advertising disaster.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“companies are focused on building products rather than brands. A product is something made in a factory. A brand is something made in the mind. To be successful today, you have to build brands, not products. And you build brands by using positioning strategies, starting with a good name. Any”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“successful positioning requires consistency. You must keep at it year after year.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.” Most companies, especially family companies, would never make fun of their own name. Yet the Smucker family did, which is one reason why Smucker’s is the No.1 brand of jams and jellies. If your name is bad, you have two choices: change the name or make fun of it.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

“While tracking trends can be a useful tool in dealing with the unpredictable future, market research can be more of a problem than a help. Research does best at measuring the past. New ideas and concepts are almost impossible to measure. No one has a frame of reference. People don’t know what they will do until they face an actual decision.
The classic example is the research conducted before Xerox introduced the plain-paper copier. What came back was the conclusion that no one would pay five cents for a plain-paper copy when they could get a Thermofax copy for a cent and a half. Xerox ignored the research, and the rest is history.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk

“The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position. Nyquil,”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“If you were forced to drink a beaker of di-hydrogen oxide, your response would probably be negative. If you asked for a glass of water, you might enjoy it. That's right. There's no difference on the palate. The difference, in the brain.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“You want to change something in a computer? Just type over or delete the existing material. You want to change something in a mind? Forget it.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

“You build brand loyalty in a supermarket the same way you build mate loyalty in a marriage. You get there first and then be careful not give them a reason to switch.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“You “burn” your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept. It’s the ultimate marketing sacrifice. Federal Express was able to put the word overnight into the minds of its prospects because it sacrificed its product line and focused on overnight package delivery only. In a way, the law of leadership—it’s better to be first than to be better—enables the first brand or company to own a word in the mind of the prospect. But the word the leader owns is so simple that it’s invisible. The leader owns the word that stands for the category. For example, IBM owns computer. This is another way of saying that the brand becomes a generic name for the category. “We need an IBM machine.” Is there any doubt that a computer is being requested? You can also test the validity of a leadership claim by a word association test. If the given words are computer, copier, chocolate bar, and cola, the four most associated words are IBM, Xerox, Hershey’s, and Coke. An astute leader will go one step further to solidify its position. Heinz owns the word ketchup. But Heinz went on to isolate the most important ketchup attribute. “Slowest ketchup in the West” is how the company”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

“The easy way to get into a person’s mind is to be first.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks. (A fashion, on the other hand, is a fad that repeats itself. Examples: short skirts for women and double-breasted suits for men. Halley’s Comet is a fashion because it comes back every 75 years or so.) When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock. What happened to Atari is typical in this respect. And look how Coleco Industries handled the Cabbage Patch Kids. Those homely dolls hit the market in 1983 and started to take off. Coleco’s strategy was to milk the kids for all they were worth. Hundreds of Cabbage Patch novelties flooded the toy stores. Pens, pencils, crayon boxes, games, clothing. Two years later, Coleco racked up sales of $776 million and profits of $83 million. Then the bottom dropped out of the Cabbage Patch Kids. By 1988 Coleco went into Chapter 11. Coleco died, but the kids live on. Acquired by Hasbro in 1989, the Cabbage Patch Kids are now being handled conservatively. Today they’re doing quite well.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

“What’s called luck is usually an outgrowth of successful communication.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“Most marketing mistakes stem from the assumption that you’re fighting a product battle rooted in reality.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

“The primary objective of a branding program is never the market for the product or service. The primary objective of a branding program is always the mind of the prospect. The mind comes first; the market follows where the mind leads.”
― Al Ries, The Origin of Brands: How Product Evolution Creates Endless Possibilities for New Brands – The Darwinian Approach to Divergence and Business Success

“To find a unique position, you must ignore conventional logic. Conventional logic says you find your concept inside yourself or inside the product. Not true. What you must do is look inside the prospect’s mind.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word, "positioning.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“The Avis campaign will go down in marketing history as a classic example of establishing the “against” position.”
― Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

“Futurist Faith Popcorn goes even further. By the year 2010, she predicts, 90 percent of all consumer products will be home-delivered. “They’ll put a refrigerator in your garage and bar code your kitchen. Every week they’ll restock your favorites, without your ever having to reorder. They’ll even pick up your dry cleaning, return your videotapes, whatever you need.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand