74 Quotes by Al Ries

If you can build a powerful brand, you will have a powerful marketing program. If you CAN’T then all the advertising, fancy packaging, sales promotion and public relations in the world won’t help you achieve your objective.

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.

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.

Your brand’s power lies in dominance. It is better to have 50% of one market, instead of 10% of five markets.

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.

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.

It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.

Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less.

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.