Al Ries Quotes

Marriage, as a human institution, depends on the concept of first being better than best. And so does business.

Test marketing has some benefits, but we believe the negatives far outweigh the benefits. Some of the negatives include: WASTED TIME. You can't afford to waste the time that test marketing takes, especially since the essence of branding is getting into the mind first. TIPPING OFF THE COMPETITION. Test marketing will alert competitors and perhaps stimulate one or more of them to introduce similar products. UNPROJECTABLE RESULTS. Test marketing for Enamelon toothpaste projected $50 million in annual sales nationally. Actual sales: $10 million. One of the problems with test marketing is overstimulation of demand. To get enough tangible results to measure, you usually have to run a local marketing program that you can't afford to run nationwide.

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.

Traditional marketing is not focused on creating new categories. Traditional marketing is focused on creating new customers. Traditional marketing involves finding out what consumers want and then giving them what they want, better and cheaper than the competition.

But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.

What’s called luck is usually an outgrowth of successful communication.

Aflac, the company that brought us the duck. In the year 2000, the company had a name recognition of 12 percent. Today it’s 94 percent. And sales have gone up just as dramatically. Aflac sales in the American market went up 29 percent the first year after the duck arrived. And 28 percent the second year. And 18 percent the third year.

To build a new brand, you must overcome the logical notion of serving a market. Instead you must focus on creating a market.

A perception that exists in the mind is often interpreted as a universal truth.

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.

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.

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.

If you want to build a successful brand, you have to understand divergence. You have to look for opportunities to create new categories by divergence of existing categories. And then you have to become the first brand in this emerging new category.

Don’t try to trick the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It’s a seduction.

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?