The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: : How to Build a Product or Service into a World‐Class Brand

Citation

Enright, M. (1999), "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: : How to Build a Product or Service into a World‐Class Brand", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.1999.16.4.1.1

In the ongoing treatment of all matters marketing by academics and practitioners, branding has more or less had its position respected and reinforced as the loftiest of the four Ps, the P for Product. From the outset, the father and daughter team from the Ries family set out to dismantle this hallowed construct and, in the process, to create a new meaning of their own. It starts on the dust jacket, which in part states: “Everyone knows that building your product or service into a bona fide brand is the only way to cut through the clutter in today′s insanely crowded marketplace ... Learn the laws of branding in the branding bible ... brilliant, bold and mercifully brief.′′ As the title suggests, the book contains 22 chapters, each expressed as a law of branding and preceded by an introduction.

The first chapter sets the style for those that follow. A heading, that is in itself a law of branding, is accompanied by a two‐line explanation that is then expanded upon in the chapter text. The delivery is genial and free of any in‐your‐face, go‐for‐it manner. This is a strong point of the book. Even if you disagree with the Ries′ view of branding, you do not have to have it surgically removed from your neck, as with so many contemporary, non‐academic works in the marketing field.

Chapter 2 is about reducing product breadth in favour of product depth. It is nevertheless introduced as a branding issue. This use of the word “branding′′ needs to be decoded a little if the reader holds to current definitions within the marketing lexicon, for what the authors call a branding issue in this chapter is more commonly interpreted as a product mix issue.

Chapter 3 deals with the authors′ contention that, in the formative years of a product′s life, publicity should be pre‐eminent over advertising. It would be understandable if some readers parted ideological company with this view. There is an abundance of material in texts and other published works to show that a lot of marketing thinkers see publicity and advertising as separate but interdependent components of a marketing communications mix. The timing of which comes first or which carries more emphasis earlier or later is very much a function of the product type being dealt with. This is nevertheless a very well‐written chapter that debunks the use of advertising for its own sake.

Having demolished the advertising function as a stand‐alone marketing communications tool, Chapter 4 proceeds to extol advertising′s virtues for more mature products. This is well handled. By now it is evident that this book is relying very much upon consumer goods, usually high volume and often of the non‐durable variety. Chapter 5 contains an excellent discussion on the stretching of a brand′s applicability. The examples used could not be better: Mercedes and BMW. The authors′ observations are summed up in the closing sentence on page 47:

Ask not what percentage of an existing market your brand can achieve, ask how large a market your brand can create by narrowing its focus and owning a word in the mind.

Chapter 6 discusses what the authors term as brand authenticity. This is a discussion of what is more commonly known as the core product concept, or, if you will, the total product offering. Chapter 7 sees the commencement of a tendency to repeat the point or, at best, reinforce it. Some readers will appreciate the reiteration; others will see it as hair splitting.

Chapter 8 argues that “a leading brand should promote the category, not the brand′′ (p. 65). The first part of this chapter really addresses new product development issues more than branding. Some of the examples are contentious. When, on page 65, it is stated, “What was the market for expensive cars before Mercedes‐Benz? Almost nothing,′′ it begs the question. Perhaps the market was already enormous, albeit an untapped one. The authors appear to suggest the use of branding as a device to tap new markets. This is a convolution of an extant and fairly basic tenet of marketing procedure ‐‐ the opportunity search ‐‐ which has less to do with branding than it does with strategic marketing issues. The Polaroid‐was‐wrong‐and‐Kodak‐was‐right argument on page 70 is a shaky one. It is argued that Polaroid should never have forced Kodak out of the instant photography market as Polaroid would have done better with a competitor than the “few million′′ (p. 70) it won in the courts. According to the Wall Street Journal of Thursday, 9 January 1986, the US domestic instant photography market alone was worth $1 billion per annum. Kodak had already wasted $230 million investing in a business it would now retreat from. It is unlikely that Polaroid suffered too much.

One of the more interesting, if not the most interesting, sections of the book is the discussion in chapter 9 of the East Asian market. Again, it has less to do with branding than it does with strategic approaches. The authors should write a book about that topic. Their argument about our misinterpretation of these markets is a compelling one.

Enough has been said about the content, not only because there are so many chapters, but because so much of their content is reiterative. It is appropriate now to turn to the Introduction, for it contains the Ries′ theories upon which the subsequent 22 chapters are predicated.

This is a book about a “marketing′′ that lies somewhere outside the conventional boundaries of the general understanding of the term. When, in the first page of the Introduction, the authors complain that “marketing has become too complicated, too confusing, and too full of jargon′′ and then, on page 2, posit that “marketing is branding ... it is impossible to separate them′′, they make a giant leap of faith that constitutes a non sequitur. That leap of faith ‐‐ or non sequitur ‐‐ is that all previous writings on the subject are redundant. This is not a well‐written section. The sweeping generalisations mount up and the sum total looks more like a set of contradictions. For example, on page 2, “if the entire company is the marketing department, then the entire company is the branding department′′ and, on the same page, “We can visualise a time when the marketing concept itself will become obsolete, to be replaced by a new concept called ‘branding′. What is accelerating this trend is the decline of selling.′′ A few lines later, on the next page, and with scarcely enough explanation, we read that “the selling is in the brand′′.

There is too much going on here with too little explanation of what it is. After all, for one of the authors, in company with Jack Trout, such previous titles as The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Marketing Warfare, and Bottom‐Up Marketing were good enough. The reader is owed a better explanation of what is wrong with marketing, why branding is taking over and why the 22 immutable laws of marketing somehow were not so immutable and need to be replaced by 22 more immutable laws, this time on branding.

This book has a strong bias towards consumer goods. Readers looking for a broad application of the laws to non‐consumer and service offerings will not find it. By giving marketing so broad a cloth that it can be thrown over 22 chapters, the authors have been able to call everything that is marketing something‐that‐is‐branding.

There is a Catch‐22. If the chance arises, read this book. It is audacious, illogical and polemic. It also makes you argue the point, reflect, and, above all, think. The book is recommended for practitioners and academics alike. Come to think of it, it would not go astray in final‐year undergraduate and postgraduate classes either. You do not have to agree with the Ries′ approach at all in order to get value from its idiosyncrasies.