Vivek Hattangadi

“Success in business inflates the egos of top management.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand

“Take facsimile, for example. Over the past two decades, the facsimile has become an indispensable part of every company’s communication portfolio. Americans will send 65 billion pages of faxes this year, more than 230 per person. And 50 percent of all international telephone calls are now fax calls.”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand

“Do you ever read annual reports, paying particular attention to the CEO’s comments? No? That’s a pity, because there you’ll find countless examples of this next error, which we all fall for at one time or another. For example, if the company has enjoyed an excellent year, the CEO catalogues his indispensable contributions: his brilliant decisions, tireless efforts and cultivation of a dynamic corporate culture. However, if the company has had a miserable year, we read about all sorts of other dynamics: the unfortunate exchange rate, governmental interference, the malicious trade practices of the Chinese, various hidden tariffs, subdued consumer confidence and so on. In short: we attribute success to ourselves and failures to external factors. This is the self-serving bias.”
― Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly: The Secrets of Perfect Decision-Making

“issue is clear. It’s the difference between building brands and milking brands. Most managers want to milk. “How far can we extend the brand? Let’s spend some serious research money and find out.” Sterling Drug was a big advertiser and a big buyer of research. Its big brand was Bayer aspirin, but aspirin was losing out to acetaminophen (Tylenol) and ibuprofen (Advil). So Sterling launched a $116-million advertising and marketing program to introduce a selection of five “aspirin-free” products. The Bayer Select line included headache-pain relief, regular pain relief, nighttime pain relief, sinus-pain relief, and a menstrual relief formulation, all of which contained either acetaminophen or ibuprofen as the core ingredient. Results were painful. The first year Bayer Select sold $26 million worth of pain relievers in a $2.5 billion market, or about 1 percent of the market. Even worse, the sales of regular Bayer aspirin kept falling at about 10 percent a year. Why buy Bayer aspirin if the manufacturer is telling you that its “select” products are better because they are “aspirin-free”? Are consumers stupid or not?”
― Al Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand