22 Laws of Marketing, Part 2
By John Wood

Last week I talked about the first 11 marketing laws from Al Ries and Jack Trout 1991 book “22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Violate them at your own risk.”

For marketers and copywriters alike, these laws are essential reading in my humble opinion. They’re important because they offer key insights when it comes to understanding the position you product holds in the marketplace.

Here are Ries and Trout's Immutable Laws of Marketing 12 through 22:

12. The Law of Line Extension – There is an irresistible pressure to extend the equity of the brand.

    Here are two examples they give of companies harming their brand by overextending it:

    1. The introduction of Coors Light caused the collapse of regular Coors which today sells one-fourth of what it used to.
    2. Back in 1978, 7 Up had a 5.7 percent market share. Then they added 7Up Gold, Cherry 7 Up and assorted diet versions. In the early 90’s, 7 Up’s share had fallen to 2.5 percent. 

13. The Law of Sacrifice – You have to give up something to get something.

    If you want to be successful today you should give something up.

    The first area you could sacrifice in is your product line. The example they give is Federal Express who focused on one service: small overnight deliveries.

    The second is market share. Pepsi gave up part of their market when they focused on the youth market and it worked brilliantly – it brought them within 10% market share of Coca Cola. Here a few of the other companies Reis and Trout cite as having given up market share by specializing: Foot Locker (athletic shoes); The Gap (casual clothing for the young at heart); Victoria Secret (sexy undergarments); The Limited (upscale clothing for working women).

    The third sacrifice is constant change. One of the examples they list is White Castle whose restaurants look the same as they did sixty years ago and still sell the same frozen sliders, yet they still average over a million dollars per year per location.

14. The Law of Attributes – For every attribute, there is an opposite, effective attribute.

    The Law of Exclusivity says that two companies can’t own the same word or position. A company must seek out another attribute (it's much better to find an opposite attribute, similar won’t do).

    For instance, Crest owns the word “cavities”. Other toothpastes avoided “cavities”. Instead they focused on taste, whitening, and breath protection.

    Of course, all attributes aren’t created equally. When it comes to toothpaste “cavities” is the best. If the best one is taken you must move on to an attribute and live with a smaller share of the market. And then dramatize its value and increase your market share.

15. The Law of Candor – When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive.

    First admit a negative and then twist it into a positive.

    Examples:
    
    “Avis is only No.2 in rent-a-cars” (Avis tries harder)
    
    “With a name like Smuckers it has to be good” (We have a bad name, but a good product.)
    
    “The 1970 VW will stay ugly longer.” (A car that ugly must be reliable.)
    
    “Joy. The Most expensive perfume in the world.” (At $375 an ounce, it has to be sensational.)

    When you state a negative it’s automatically viewed as the truth. When you state a positive it’s looked upon as dubious at best.

    Another great example of twisting a negative into a positive is how Listerine reacted when Scope entered the market with a “good-tasting” mouthwash. They came out with “Listerine: The taste you hate twice a day.”

16. The Law of Singularity – In each situation, only one move will produce substantial results.

    According to Reis and Trout “many marketing people see success as the sum total of a lot of small efforts beautiful executed. They think as long as they put the effort in they’ll be successful whether you try hard or try easy, the differences are marginal”. They say the one thing that works in marketing is the single, bold stroke.

    An example they give is the two strong moves that were made against General Motors. The Japanese came at the low end with small cars like Toyota, Datsun and Honda. The Germans came at the high end with super premium cars like Mercedes and BMW.

17. The Law of Unpredictability – Unless you write your competitors’ plans, you can’t predict the future.

    Marketing plans based on what will happen in the future are usually wrong. It’s very difficult to predict your market. You can get a handle on trends, but the danger for many companies is they jump to conclusions about how far a trend will go.

18. The Law of Success – Success often leads to arrogance and arrogance to failure.

    Ego is the enemy of successful marketing.  Objectivity is what is needed.

    Companies who became arrogant according to Ries and Trout are General Motors, Sears, Roebuck and IBM. Quite simply they felt they could anything they wanted to in the marketplace. And of, course, they were wrong.

    In my opinion, IBM’s arrogance peaked back in the days of the IBM PC, XT, AT and the PS/2 line of computers. The difference between models was based more on marketing considerations rather than supplying their customers with a technically superior product. Compaq computers, on the other hand, focused on pushing the technical limits of their products and soon gained a reputation for building a superior computer, eventually outselling IBM.

    The bottom line being while ego can be an effective driving force when it comes to building a business – it can hurt if you inject it into your marketing.

19. The Law of Failure – Failure is to be expected and accepted.

    Too many companies try to fix things rather than drop things. For instance, American Motors should have abandoned passenger cars and focused on the Jeep. IBM should have dropped copiers and Xerox should have dropped computers years before they finally recognized their mistakes.

20. The Law of Hype – The situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press.

    Hype usually means a company’s in trouble. According to Ries and Trout, when things are going well you don’t need hype.  

    For example, new coke had tons of publicity, but as everyone knows it bombed. Remember Steve Job’s NeXt Computers? All the hype in the world couldn’t turn NexT Computers into the next big thing in computers.

    History is full of failures that were successful in the press. Tucker 48, US Football league, Videotext, the automated factory, the personal helicopter, the manufactured home, the picture phone, polyester suits. The essence of the hype was not just that these products would be successful, but they would render existing products obsolete.

    For the most part hype is hype. The authors tell us that "real revolutions don’t arrive at high noon with marching bands and coverage on the 6:00 pm news. Real revolutions arrive unannounced in the middle of the night and sneak up on you."

21. The Law of Acceleration – Successful programs are not built on fads, they’re built on trends.

    According to Ries and Trout, "A fad is a wave. A trend is the tide. A fad gets hype. A trend gets very little. A fad is a short-term phenomena that in the long-term doesn’t do a company that much good".

    A great example they cite is Coleco Industries Cabbage Patch Kids. They hit the market in 1983. Two years later they had sales of 776 million with profits of 83 million.

    Then in 1988 the bottom fell out. Coleco filed for Chapter 11. (In 1989, they were acquired by Hasbro where Cabbage Patch Kids with more conservative marketing are doing quite well.)

    Fads don’t last. When everyone has a Ninja turtle, nobody wants one anymore. Compare that to Barbie which is a trend and continues to be popular.

22. The Law of Resources – Without adequate funding an idea won’t get off the ground.

    The best idea in the world needs money to make it happen. A mediocre idea and a million dollars is better than a great idea with no money.

In the final chapter, authors Al Ries and Jack Trout talk about which laws might not accepted into the corporate culture of most companies.

The Law of Perception runs counter to the idea that to be number one you have to produce the best product. The Law of Leadership is tough to swallow by most people because they’d like to believe they got to the top by being better, not by being first. The Law of Sacrifice? Most companies are still attempting to offer everything for everybody.

And then there’s the most dangerous law of all to deal with, the Law of Extension. Management holds a basic truth of business to be that big successful brands have an equity that can be exploited to encompass different kinds of products.

No matter what you think to be true, being aware of these 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing will help you better understand your product’s relationship to its marketplace — which can only make you a better marketer.