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The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
This is a summary of ideas from the book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Text in normal is my paraphrasing of what the book says. Text in italic represents my personal comments. And remember: this is just a short summary and is not meant to replace the book, nothing beats reading the real thing. The book is short, buy and read it.
will maintain the perception that it's wonderfully sunny day. Therefore one way of changing the perception is to change the reality (e.g. improve the quality of your cars). Maybe having the desired reality is not enough to achieve desired perception but it's hard to argue that you can create any perception you want regardless of reality. If your car breaks down every 10 miles no amount of marketing will convince people that it has high quality.
Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure. Don't be arrogant, drop the ego, be objective.
Summary
How one should judge a book on marketing? If the book gives information that allows you to do better marketing, then it's a good marketing book. In my opinion "The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing" fails in that respect. Their examples that illustrate the laws are taken from the relatively small pool of the biggest companies in the world. It's not evident that the same rules apply to small (or medium) businesses. The advice is frequently not helpful, e.g. "make sure your program deals realistically with your position on the ladder". Well, thanks guys, but how exactly? A very frequent flaw of this book is its use of selected examples to illustrate their laws. If I can choose my examples I can make any laws I want - there will always be an example that support my "law" (the problem is that there might be 100 counter-examples that I won't mention). I can understand that providing counter-examples isn't something that authors were interested in, that a rule that is only correct in 80% of the cases is still a very useful rule, that not talking about every possibility can improve the clarity of exposition ("A little inaccuracy can save tons of explanation") but I got the
impression that author's way of choosing examples was based on "whatever seems to confirm what we say" principle. And never forget: Marketing is the science of convincing us that What You Get Is What You Want. -- John Carter