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The Law of the Generic: One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a brand a generic name.
Al Ries
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Al Ries
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: November 14
Author
Economist
Atlanta
Georgia
Brands
Failure
Name
Names
Law
Generic
Giving
Fastest
Routes
Brand
More quotes by Al Ries
Only brand names register in the mind... What you should generally do is take a regular word and use it out of context to connote the primary attribute of your brand.
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Advertising is the way great brands get to be great brands.
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A branding program should be designed to differentiate your cow from all the other cattle on the range. Even if all the cattle on the range look pretty much alike.
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Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills.
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The real barrier (to building a brand) is the human mind. It normally takes decades to build a brand because it takes decades to penetrate the gray matter in between your ears.
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What's your brand? If you can't answer that question about your own brand in two or three words, your brand's in trouble.
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Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things.
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Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less.
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What should a brand leader advertise?Brand leadership, of course. Leadership is the single most important motivating factor in consumer behavior.
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If you want to build a brand, you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect's mind. A word that nobody else owns.
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To get into the consumer's mind, you have to sacrifice. You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute. An attribute that nobody else already owns in your category.
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The next generation product almost never comes from the previous generation.
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Your brand's power lies in dominance. It is better to have 50% of one market, instead of 10% of five markets.
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Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.
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Successful brands get into the mind slowly. A blurb in a magazine. A mention in a newspaper. A comment from a friend. A display in a retail store. After a slow buildup, people become convinced that they have known about the brand forever.
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Customers want brands that are narrow in scope and distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.
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The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity.
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It's the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product. IBM didn't invent the computer Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect's mind.
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Changing the direction of a large company is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier. It takes a mile before anything happens. And if it was a wrong turn, getting back on course takes even longer.
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Marketing is not selling. Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the prospect.
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