Al Ries Quotes

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.

The single most wasteful thing you can do in marketing is try to change a mind.

Names don't matter, many managers believe; it's the product that matters. With the right product at the right price, goes the thinking, we can win the battle of the marketplace. Names do matter. Depending on the category, the name alone can represent the primary reason for the brand's success. A company might spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new product and then give that new product a brand name that almost guarantees failure. Innovation alone is never enough. Along with innovation, a company needs marketing to assure the brand's eventual success and survival. The heart of a good marketing program is a great name.

To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the only reality that counts is what’s already in the prospect’s mind. To be creative, to create something that doesn’t already exist in the mind, is becoming more and more difficult. If not impossible. 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.

The most difficult part of positioning is selecting that one specific concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if you want to cut through the prospect's wall of indifference.

The Avis campaign will go down in marketing history as a classic example of establishing the “against” position.

With a plethora of products in every category, how does a company use advertising to blast its way into the mind? The basic underlying marketing strategy has got to be “reposition the competition.” Because there are so few creneaus to fill, a company must create one by repositioning the competitors that occupy the positions in the mind. In other words, to move a new idea or product into the mind, you must first move an old one out.

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.

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.

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

What should a brand leader advertise? Brand leadership, of course. Leadership is the single most important motivating factor in consumer behavior.

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.

In our overcommunicated society, the paradox is that nothing is more important than communication.

Success in business inflates the egos of top management.

Advertising can only maintain brands that have been created by publicity.