The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind-one that reflects a company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors. Writing in their trademark witty, fast-paced style, advertising gurus Ries and Trout explain how to:

• Make and position an industry leader so that its name and message wheedles its way into the collective subconscious of your market-and stays there
• Position a follower so that it can occupy a niche not claimed by the leader
• Avoid letting a second product ride on the coattails of an established one.

Positioning also shows you how to:

• Use leading ad agency techniques to capture the biggest market share and become a household name
• Build your strategy around your competition’s weaknesses
• Reposition a strong competitor and create a weak spot
• Use your present position to its best advantage
• Choose the best name for your product
• Determine when-and why-less is more
• Analyze recent trends that affect your positioning.

Ries and Trout provide many valuable case histories and penetrating analyses of some of the most phenomenal successes and failures in advertising history. Revised to reflect significant developments in the five years since its original publication, Positioning is required reading for anyone in business today.

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There are laws of nature, so why shouldn’t there be laws of marketing?

As Al Ries and Jack Trout—the world-renowned marketing consultants and bestselling authors of Positioning—note, you can build an impressive airplane, but it will never leave the ground if you ignore the laws of physics, especially gravity. Why then, they ask, shouldn’t there also be laws of marketing that must be followed to launch and maintain winning brands? In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Ries and Trout offer a compendium of twenty-two innovative rules for understanding and succeeding in the international marketplace. From the Law of Leadership, to The Law of the Category, to The Law of the Mind, these valuable insights stand the test of time and present a clear path to successful products. Violate them at your own risk.

Reviews

I’d read the book when it was best seller. I recently found it referenced in an interesting context and decided to read it again.

The re-read made me feel like a business strategy time traveler.

This 13-some-year-old book for “Marketing” was written when the Sales, Marketing and Biz Strategy organization was silo’d. The ‘22 Immutable Laws of Marketing’ is once again making its way through academics and biz leaders as common wisdom for the whole modern enterprise. It’s a guide book that should be titled “Never Do This!” while hinting at the remarkable strategies that bring us today’s top brands.

‘The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing’ is a quick read. The management and strategy job has evolved in interesting ways from this books timeframe. The day of the “Ad Man” fronting your enterprise’s value proposition to customers is over. The “Sale!” is made after a carefully engineered organizational effort. Marketing strategy is a discipline to be trained among everyone that answers an outside phone. Everyone now has a marketing role and here is not a bad place to start spreading the news.

A hugely entertaining element is simply that the reader has been fast forwarded through corporate strategies tried, failed and successful. Lotus 1-2-3, VisiCalc, Amiga, Emery Air vs FedEx, Tandem, Wang … all without smart phones or vast system networks … strategy winners and losers make for a forensic business case … if you’ve been around awhile, you won’t believe the book was written just 15 years ago.

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One of the most respected marketing gurus in the world shows why some of today’s biggest brands are having trouble and how to avoid repeating their mistakes.

It wasn’t long ago that Levi-Strauss, Xerox, Crest, AT&T, Firestone, and Digital Equipment dominated their respective markets. What happened to undermine their standings and of those of other superbrands? Are their declines simply the inevitable consequence of change and the birth of new competition? In this important predecessor to the classic Differentiate or Die, “the king of positioning,” Jack Trout answers that question with a resounding “No!” Writing in his signature, straight-from-the-hip style he reveals the disastrous marketing and strategy blunders that led to the dissolution of the most recognized superbrands. He clearly shows how those mistakes could have been avoided. With the help of in-depth case studies chronicling the events leading up to the falls from grace of Sears, Miller Brewing, Xerox, Crest, Burger King, and other past market leaders, he identifies the ten most common mistakes that big brands make, and he develops a set of expert guidelines for marketing managers and executives on how to build, protect, manage, and expand their companies’ brands and avoid brand-killing blunders.

Reviews

Jack Trout, head of the marketing firm Trout & Partners, digs for details about the major reasons big brands run into trouble and just how enormous companies mess up by handling their signature standard-bearers badly. He runs down the litany: mistaken extensions of the brand name, failures to differentiate the brand’s qualities and loss of clarity about just what a brand represents. His failure sagas are mini-novels based inside Xerox, General Motors, AT&T, Digital Equipment, General Mills and Coca-Cola. Remember New Coke? Now that was a branding debacle. Trout highlights corporate shortcomings and lays the blame for branding woes right at the feet of people who should have known better: of out-of-touch CEOs, ineffective consultants and dysfunctional boards. Alert consumers who like insider business war stories will enjoy this clear, lively book, but if you own a company or market a brand, we from getAbstract suspect you should read it twice.

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