The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

Al Ries and Laura Ries

Summary
1.
The Law of Expansion: The power of the brand is inversely proportional to
its scope
2.
The Law of Contraction: A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its
focus
3.
The Law of Publicity: The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not
advertising
4.
The Law of Advertising: Once born, a brand needs advertising to stay
healthy
5.
The Law of the Word: A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of
the consumer
6.
The Law of Credential: The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand
is its claim to authenticity
7.
The Law of Quality: Quality is important, but brands are not built by quality
alone
8.
The Law of the Category: A leading brand should promote the category,
but not the brand
9.
The Law of the Name: In the long run a brand is nothing more than a
name
10.
The Law of Extensions: The easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its
name on everything
11.
The Law of Fellowship: In order to build the category, a brand should
welcome other brands
12.
The Law of the Generic: One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a
brand a generic name
13.
The Law of the Company: Brands are brands. Companies are companies.
There is a difference
14.
The Law of Subbrands: What branding builds, subbranding can destroy
15.
The Law of Siblings: There is a time and place to launch a second brand
16.
The Law of Shape: A brands logo should be designed to fit the eyes. Both
eyes.
17.
The Law of Colour: A brand should use a colour that is the opposite of its
major competitors
18.
The Law of Borders: There are no barriers to global branding. A brand
should know no borders
19.
The Law of Consistency: A brand is not built overnight. Success is
measured in decades, not years
20.
The Law of Change: Brands can be changed, but only infrequently and
only very carefully
21.
The Law of Mortality: No brand will live forever. Euthanasia is often the
best solution
22.
The Law of Singularity: The most important aspect of a brand is its singlemindedness

Introduction

Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the prospect: If you can build a
powerful brand, you will have a powerful marketing program

Marketing is branding: everything that a company does can contribute to

the brand-building process

Today most products are no longer bought and sold ie: in a supermarket
there is no selling just buying. The consumer makes a choice based on the
products available with minimal assistance or prompting from staff

Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things as it pre-sells the

product or service to the consumer

There is a seismic shift in the world of business from selling to buying

A brand name is nothing more than a word in the mind, albeit a special
kind of word

A commodity purchase is when the consumer is willing to purchase any

brand as long as it is the product that s/he is after (eg: milk and bread)

A brand purchase is when the brand of the product is important to the

consumer (eg: cigarettes and beer)

Aim high, you can never achieve more than you aspire to

A branding program should be used to differentiate your cow from all of

the other cattle on the range. Even if all the cattle in the range look pretty
much alike.

Branding creates the perception in the mind of the consumer that there is
no product on the market quite like your product

1) The Law of Expansion

When you put your brand name on everything, that brand name loses its
power

The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope

The question that has to be asked is: do you keep a narrow line in order to
build the brand in the mind and increase sales in the future?

Case study: American Express used to have a very strong brand and
membership used to have its privileges, it used to be prestigious to own one
etc. Then it broadened its product line with new products and services. The
result was that its share of the card market fell from 27% to 18%

Many companies try to justify the line extension by invoking the

masterbrand, superbrand or megabrand concept
1. Chevrolet is the megabrand and Camaro, Caprice, Cavalier etc are the
individual brands
2. Pontiac is the megabrand and Firebird, Grand Am etc are the individual
brands

Consumers want short and simple names that they can identify with the
product. Marketers tend to go a bit far in the opposite direction and give
products ling names that they think will make the consumers identify their
brand as different

If the competition is week, you can expand your product in the market and
this may result in increased sales. But this only serves to show that the
competition is weak, not that you are strong

To build powerful brands, you have to contract it, not expand it

2) The Law of Contraction

Narrowing ones focus is not the same as carrying a limited line. Starbucks
offers thirty different types of coffee.

Good things happen when you contract your brand rather than expand it
it is focused

When you only make one thing, you get pretty good at making that thing

The five step pattern

1. Narrow the focus. A powerful branding program always starts by
contracting the category, not expanding it
2. Stock in depth: carry maybe one or two types of product, but lots of it
3. Buy cheap: buy in bulk to reduce overall costs
4. Sell cheap: when you buy cheap you can sell cheap and still maintain
good margins
5. Dominate the category: this is the ultimate objective of a branding program

When you dominate a category you become extremely powerful. In

order to dominate your category you must narrow your brand focus

If you want to become a successful company, do what the

successful companies did before they became successful (buying private jets
is what a successful company might do now, but if a start-up tries that it wont
help them at all)

3) The Law of Publicity

With virtually no advertising, but with massive amounts of publicity, The

Body Shop has become a powerful global brand it was the endless torrent
of newspaper and magazine articles, plus radio and television interviews that
literally created The Body Shop

Advertising generally wont get a new brand off the ground

A new brand must be capable of generating favourable publicity in the

media or it wont have a chance in the market place

The best way to generate publicity is by being the first brand in a new
category media wants to report what is new, not what is best

What others say about your brand is far more powerful that what you can
say about it yourself

Todays brands are built with publicity maintained by advertising

Companies such as Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Gateway, Oracle, Compaq etc

are companies that were first created by the Wall Street Journal, Business
Week, Forbes and Fortune Magazine publicity, not advertising

Strategy should be developed from a publicity point of view rather than

from an advertising perspective

4) The Law of Advertising

Publicity is an essential tool for a product in its initial stages, but the
product will eventually outlive the publicity you cant rely on publicity forever

After the product has been written about and spoken about in the media,
get the media to concentrate on the company and how innovative the
company is etc. Once that avenue of publicity has been exhausted, then you
must turn to advertising
ie: First publicity, then advertising
You should look at your advertising budget as insurance that protects the
brand against losses caused by competitive attacks

A brand leader should advertise brand leadership eg: Good Year, #1 in

tyres

When you say that the product is better consumers think that is what
they all say, but when you advertise that your product is the leader, they
think that it must be better

Most people buy the leading brand

Advertising is useful to maintain brand leadership, but not to obtain it

5) The Law of the Word

FedEx has become synonymous with overnight delivery

To build a brand you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in
the prospects mind. A word that nobody else owns (eg: Volvo owns the word
safety)

A common mistake in branding is when once the company owns a word

it then moves on to broaden its base and enter into other markets

In the same way that Kleenex owns tissue (Can you pass me a Kleenex
really means, can you pass me that box of tissues even though it may not
be Kleenex), Coca Cola owns cola, Band Aid owns adhesive bandages and
Rollerblade owns in-line skates you know when your brand owns the
category name when people use your brand name generically

You can only become a generic brand by being the first (Pepsi will never
own the word cola even if it outsells Coke

If you were not the first in your category, you can become the first by
creating a new category by narrowing your focus eg: FedEx overtook Emery
because Emery offered all different types of services. FedEx concentrated
only on overnight deliveries and soon became famous for being able to
deliver packages overnight, while Emery was not seen to be able to deliver
that quickly

The product itself might have a visual reality, but its the brand name and
its associations that give the product meaning in the mind of the consumers

Dont expand the brand, expand the market make your product the inthing in your industry eg: Hey, this data must be important because it was
analysed using ICRFS

6) The Law of Credentials

Credentials are the collateral that you put up to guarantee performance of

your brand

Leadership is the most direct way to guarantee credentials for your brand

Everywhere that the brand name is used, so are the credentials (The
Real Thing was used in the 70s every time Coca Cola was mentioned

Credentials are important in the publicity process. Reporters and editors

will not dismiss leadership and other aspects to a brands credentials as
puffery
- If a reporter is doing a story on car rentals, they will call Hertz
- If a reporter is doing a story on cola, they will call Coca Cola
- If a reporter is doing a story on computer software, they will call
Microsoft

When the benefits of a product are structured around

credentials, they carry much more weight

Never assume that people know who the leader is in a

category

Most people would walk away from an empty restaurant and

wait for a table at a busy one because the food/service/ambiance must be
better at the full one, otherwise there would be a line outside the door of the
empty restaurant

7) The Law of Quality

There is almost no correlation between the popularity of the product and

the quality of the product (Coke outsells Pepsi, but taste tests prove that
Pepsis taste is preferred by consumers over Coke)

Quality or the perception of quality is in the mind branding

When you contract your lines and focus on one thing you become a
specialist rather than a generalist a specialist doctor is better qualified than
a general practitioner

Being a specialist and having a better name go hand-in-hand. Expanding

a brand and being a generalist erodes your ability to have a powerful name
eg: General Electric, General Motors might be well known but as brands they
are weak they can still be a sales success if they compete against other
weak or weaker brands

Most of GEs competitors are also generalist: Westinghouse, General

Motors and United Technologies

Weak brands cannot successfully compete against strong brands: GE

failed in its bid to enter into the mainframe market because IBM, a specialist,
was much stronger

Having a high price also gives consumers the impression of quality can
a Rolex keep better time than a Casio watch? No, but it is better quality
because it is more expensive (does your waiter suggest a $20 bottle of wine
when you ordered an $80 bottle, even if the cheaper one tastes better? No,
because the price tag determines the quality)

Brands are not built by quality alone

When faced with a sea of similar products, a good strategy is often to

inflate the price and ask yourself what you can put in it to justify the price
increase eg: Chivas Regal allows the whiskey to age longer, Rolex makes
watches bigger and heavier with unique wristbands etc

Having a quality product will save you time and money on service costs
later on, but quality alone will not build a brand

8) The Law of the Category

When you narrow the focus to such a degree that there is no longer any
market for the brand, create a new category

Create a new category and become the first and thus, the leading brand

To build something out of nothing you have to launch the brand in such a
way that there is a perception that you were the first and you have to promote
the new category

When Apple launched the Newton, they forgot to categorise it. They called
it a PDA, but a notebook computer, mobile phone or electronic organisers can
all be classified as Personal Digital Assistants. You knew that Apple was in
trouble when they launched an advertising campaign What is it?

EatZis decided to create a new category and focused on selling

restaurant meals for takeout only ie: white tablecloth, restaurant quality takeaway food. A new category, separate from pizza, burgers and sandwiches
they call the category the meal-market

Once competition arrives, concentrate on promoting the category to

increase the size of the pie, rather than increase their slice competition can
be good for publicity (see chapter 11)

9) The Law of the Name

In the long run, a brand is nothing more than a name

In the long term, the unique idea or concept disappears and what is left is
the company name

Xerox built the first plain paper copier. Today all copiers are plain paper,
but what distinguishes Xerox from the rest of the market is their name

What is important is the perception that the name creates (eg: A Rolls
Royce may not really be a better car than a Jaguar or a Bentleigh, but the
name suggests that it is and you have to believe it because it is the Rolls
Royce of automobiles

The most valuable asset of the Xerox corporation is its name it is short,
unique and connotes high technology

What is a Mitsubishi? Is it a car? A television? A semiconductor? It is all of

these ie; generic. The only thing worse than a generic name is a line
extended generic name eg: The Mitsubishi Fax Master (nobody can
distinguish it from the other fax machines. It is not unique)

10) The Law of Extensions

Line extension kills sales of the original brand.

Product A is released and is doing well (Lets call it Acme Beer) so then we
extend the product line to attract more customers Acme Light, Acme Bitter,
Acme Extra Taste. You dont attract more customers, but you shift customers
from Acme Beer to the extended lines isnt an Acme Beer drinker more
likely to try Acme Light than a Budweiser drinker?

If you extend your product you may be suggesting that the original wasnt
the best. That is why New Coke failed wasnt the Real Thing really the
Real Thing? Should Evian launch Sulfate Free Water wasnt the original
water good for you?

Management often measures the extension rather than the new product.
So just because Kellogs Fruit Loops is successful, it doesnt mean that
Kellogs Healthy Style Fruit Loops will also do well IT MAY ERODE YOUR
ORIGINAL LINE but

What will customers of the current brand think when they see your
extended brand?

If the market is moving out from under you, stay where you are and launch
a completely second brand (ie: not ICRF-Plus2 but ABCDE brand)

11) The Law of Fellowship

One of the best locations from a number two brand is right across the road
from the leader both brands will benefit

Choice stimulates demand the competition between Coke and Pepsi

makes consumers more cola conscious (a monopoly makes consumers
suspicious. Look at Microsoft)

Competition broadens the category while allowing the brands to maintain

focus

But when there is too much choice, consumers get confused eg: in
California there are 1,000 wineries and 5,000 brands but no brand leader

Two major brands work well eg: Coke and Pepsi, Kodak and Fuji, Duracell
and Energiser

Often the law of Fellowship can be seen in Business Centres, Shopping

Centres etc eg: the garment district on 7th Avenue or the diamond district on
Forty Seventh Street or the financial centre of Wall Street

It makes sense for similar businesses to be located near each other.

Similar businesses in the same area attracts more customers who can
comparison shop and have a choice. Businesses can also keep an eye on
their competition

No brand can ever own the entire market (except Windows!)

12) The Law of the Generic

There are many successful companies that have generic names (eg:
General motors, American Airlines, International Business Machines).

The success of these companies are probably due to the fact that they
were the first in the marketplace, not their names eg: National Biscuit
Company was the first national biscuit company; General Electric was the first
General Electric company etc

The Generic names of these companies have transformed into specific

names eg:

National Biscuit Company now calls itself Nabisco (there are many
biscuit companies, but only one Nabisco)
General Electric now calls itself GE (There are many general
electric companies, but only one GE)
National Broadcasting Corporation calls itself NBC (There are many
national broadcasting corporations, but only one NBC)

Generic names dont give the company the ability to distinguish

themselves from the rest of the competition you need Brand Identity (that is
why ICRFS is better than Interactive Claims Reserving Forecasting System!)

Try to find a regular word taken out of context and used to connote the
primary attribute of the brand eg: Blockbuster for Blockbuster Video

If you cut a generic name in half, you can come up with a good name eg:
Intelligent Chip Company is too long and too generic but everybody knows
and remembers Intel Intel is a powerful brand because it reminds
consumers of the word intelligent without actually saying it

Line extensions fare poorly. This is often caused by combining the brand
name with the generic name eg: Fosters Light can be perceived in the mind
as Fosters light a watered down version of Fosters

Sometimes the opposite is true eg: Vaseline Intensive Care is successful

because people dont say, pass the Vaseline, but they say pass the
Intensive Care Intensive Care has become a specific name, transformed
from a generic name

13) The Law of the Company

Should the brand name dominate the company name or should the
company name dominate the brand name should they be given equal
weight.

Brand names should almost always outweigh company names

consumers buy brands, not companies

Unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise, the best branding

strategy should be to use the company name as the brand name (eg: Coca
Cola produces Coca Cola, WD40 produces WD40 etc)

The brand name is the word that the customers use to describe the
product eg: Do you want some Coca Cola? I bought a Cadillac today. Put it in
an Excel Spreadsheet

Microsoft Word this is a generic name because there are other word
processors that use Word as part of their name (Wordstar, WordPerfect etc)
So consumers tend to refer to it as Microsoft Word (or MS Word). This can be
bad for the company because the name is too long (eg: people dont say,
Can I have the chunky soup? they are forced to say, Can I have the
Campbells Chunky Soup)

Your company name should not dominate your brand if you make the
company name too small consumers might get suspicious that you are trying
to hide something. If it is too large then the company overshadows the brand
and CONSUMERS BUY BRANDS, NOT COMPANIES

Use the company name in a secondary way

14) The Law of Subbrands

Holiday Inn has many subbrands Holiday Inn Express, Holiday Inn
Select, Holiday Inn Sun Spree Resorts, Holiday Inn Garden Court. When you
went into a Holiday Inn, you knew what to expect. Because of all of these
subbrands, you dont know what to expect

Subbranding can erode the power of the core brand

Market research at Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza produced the following
response from guests, Its a nice hotel, but a bit expensive for a Holiday Inn.
From now on the hotels will be called Crowne Plaza (If I am forking out the
big bucks, I want to stay at a big brand hotel)
Subbranding tries to push the core brand into a new direction.

Ford is not a brand. The brands are Laser, Falcon and Fairlane Ford is a
Megabrand, but consumers dont understand this concept.

Branding is all about creating perceptions in the mind of consumers.

Subbranding creates confusion and this destroys the brands image

A brand can be marketed in more than one model as long as those

models dont detract from the essence of the brand

15) The Law of Siblings

There does come a time when there is a need to launch a second brand
but not so that it detracts from the original brand

Sometimes it is good to create a family of brands sibling brands

Each brand has to be different and distinct in its own right

Some managers want to take advantage of the equity that they have in
their brand, but they are mistaken if they use the existing brand to support the
new one as it could damage the original brand

Time Inc is the worlds largest magazine publisher by launching totally

separate publications ie: Time, Fortune (not Time for Business), Life (not Time
for Pictures), Sports Illustrated (not Time for Sports), Money (not Time for
Finances), People (not Time for celebrities)

Siblings are not associated as being in the same category as the other
members of the family

The siblings can all be controlled by the same parent. Upper management
has to be more involved to ensure that there is no mixing of the siblings so
that they remain separate

Do not tag the company name onto every sibling do Lexus buyers buy a
Lexus because it is made by Toyota? Or in spite of the fact that it is made by
Toyota

Keep the following siblings in mind:

- Focus on a common product area
- Select a single attribute to each segment (eg: distribution, age,
flavours but most commonly, price
- Set up rigid distinctions between brands
- Create different brand names for each sibling
- Create a new sibling only if you can create a new category
- Keep control of the siblings at the highest level otherwise the
effectiveness of the brands can degrade.

A sibling strategy can be used to dominate a category over the long term

16) The Law of Shape

A logo is a combination of a trademark and the name of the brand set in a

distinctive type

A logo:
- should be horizontal
- should be legible

does not have to be accompanied by a symbol (but over time a

symbol can come to represent the name of the brand eg: the Nike
swoosh) the power of the brand name overrides logo recognition

17) The Law of Colour

Colour can help to make a brand distinctive

It is best to stick to the five basic colours of red, blue, green, yellow and
orange rather than a mixed colour or combination of colours
- Red is the colour of energy and excitement (Coca Cola)
- Blue is a tranquil colour but also a corporate/leadership colour
(IBM)
- Orange is an in-between colour which is like Red,
- Green is the colour of the environment (eg: Vitamins, Health Foods)
- Yellow is a neutral colour that also is associated with caution (road
signs)

There are other colours which can be used as well:

- White is the colour of purity (Weddings)
- Black is the colour of luxury (Johnnie Walker Black Label)
- Purple is the colour of royalty

Focus on the identity that the brand should create, not just the mood

Choose the best colour possible, but if there is another brand with that
colour, choose the opposite colour

The colours that you choose will determine whether consumers can
visualise your logo or not eg: Coke is easy to visualise (lots of red) but
Pepsi has two colours and it is difficult to picture

Line extensions destroy the impact of colour on the original brand

Sometimes, but rarely, a case can be made for multiple colours eg: FedEx
chose two colours that would be sure to stand out on someones desk
orange and purple

18) The Law of Borders

Building a global brand means: keeping the brands narrow focus in its
home country and going global

The words imported product on a brand creates the perception of quality

Heineken Beer is actually made in Holland but because of its geographical

proximity to Germany and because of the perception that Germany produces
very good beer, Heineken capitalised on that perception. They even
distributed cardboard coasters that had written on them Printed in Germany

There is no such thing as a global brand without a global perception (eg:

Toyota, Honda and Nissan are Japanese, Compaq, Intel and Microsoft are
American etc)

Coca Cola is one of the only brands that can be classified as being the
closest to a truly International brand but it must stay with its American
heritage because every brand must originate from somewhere

It doesnt matter where the brand originated, is produced etc, the name
and the associated connotations determine its geographic perception eg:
Hagen-Dazs ice cream sounds Scandinavian, but it was developed in New
Jersey

The use of English words in promoting a brand and in the brand name is
important because English has become an international language (Red Bull
energy drink is Austrian, but they dont call it Roter Stier!)

The name of your product doesnt have to be an English word but must
sound like one.

Be careful with advertising slogans because sometimes they dont

translate well eg: Come alive with the Pepsi generation translates to
Chinese as Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead

19) The Law of Consistency

A brand cannot get into the mind unless it stands for something. BMW has
been the ultimate driving machine for 25 years

Brands should never change they can be bent slightly or given a new
slant but not changed

If the market moves, stick with the brand and the cycle will come back to
you (just because the trend is towards white alcohol (gin, vodka etc) Jack
Daniels would destroy its whiskey line if they introduced Jack Daniels Vodka)

Limiting the brand is the essence of branding. Limiting the brand and
being consistent (over decades) is the key to successful branding

20) The Law of Change

Brand changing occurs in the mind of the consumer, not inside the
company
There are 3 feasible situations for changing a brand:
1. Your brand is weak or non-existent in the mind of consumers (eg: not
many realised that Intel was originally a producer of RAM but moved into
processors nobody but those directly involved even noticed! If they
were to try to move back to manufacturing RAM, they would fail because
their product is strong in the minds of consumers)
2. You want to move the brand down the food chain. Lower the price of your
product over time and make it cheaper. This often helps a company to
gain market share (Marlborough did it). Moving up is far more difficult
3. The brand is in a slow moving field and change will take place over a
period of time. Eg: Citicorp is slowly changing its brands focus from
corporate business to consumer business

Customer perceptions of brands dont go away so quickly eg: Kentucky

Fried Chicken wanted to move away from Fried so it called itself KFC and
offered healthier style chicken, but people still went to them for fried chicken.

21) The Law of Mortality

Brands have a life cycle they are born, prosper and die.

Companies spend millions trying to change an old brand (Kodak uses the
Kodak name on all digital products to try to change with the market)

Opportunities for new markets are always being created with the birth of
new categories

Many managers make poor financial decisions because they fail to

distinguish between the two aspects of a brands value: How well known it is
and what the brand stands for

A well known brand that doesnt stand for anything has no value and a
brand that stands for something but is not well known has value because
there is the opportunity to create a powerful brand

Brand new brands make the impact, not rehashed old brands (eg:
Blockbuster video became a market leader in video rentals even though it
was up against established companies who were too generic and not exciting
enough in the new category

22) The Law of Singularity

Your brand must be a single idea or concept that you own inside of a
prospect if it is too many things at once, it is confusing and becomes
worthless

What is an Atari? It used to be the most popular games console but then it
became a computer and now it is nothing because it lost its singularity

Volvo sells more cars in the US than BMW or Mercedes because over 35
years it has stuck to its concept of burning into the minds of consumers that it
is the safest car on the road