Book of the Day - The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing By Al Ries, Jack Trout
Incredible! As any Al Ries book tends to be, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing was top shelf reading from the first page. There’s not a single second of wasted information. I’ve worked with numerous startups and have been interested in brand building vs. Marketing. Brand building vs. marketing is where this book shines.
With topics ranging from brand line extensions == watch out! To creating and owning a word to define your market. being first to the market isn’t everything, but it damn well might as well be. The key isn’t to literally be the first to create something, but to be the first to create something and then define the market for it. You can have the exact same product as someone else, but you have to define your market differently.
An example discussed in the book was beer. Beer came up pretty frequently. Heineken was the first beer imported to the US and is the #1 imported beer.
Another example I loved was, can you name the Top University in America? You will likely say Harvard. In reality, Harvard was the first college. Whether Harvard is better than any other college isn’t important, it’s the perception in others mind that it is the best. The can be said about many products you purchase today. People don’t care about a new product that’s better than the number one brand. You won’t win. You must define a new quadrant for your product to live in.
This new quadrant is what you see day in and day out in the tech startup world with everyone trying to get into some new Gartner quadrant for a new security product definition. SIEM (Security Incident and Event Manager) is a good example. Splunk is the number one siem in the world. If you ask someone about a SIEM they’ll say “Splunk”. How do startups fight against Splunk in the SIEM space? They redefine themselves as “Autonomous SOC”, “Next Gen SIEM”, and so many more terms to label themselves differently. In the end, it might work, but it’s taking a long long time.
