The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them At Your Own Risk! — Book Notes

Al Ries, Jack Trout

Si Quan Ong
12 min readAug 2, 2017

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Published: 1994

Who are Al Ries & Jack Trout?

In their own words: Al Ries & Jack Trout are probably the world’s best-known marketing strategists. Along with Jack Trout, Ries is credited with coining the term “positioning”, as related to the field of marketing

What This Book Is About:

If there are laws of the jungle and laws of the universe, there should also be laws that marketing professionals follow. These are the 22 laws of marketing.

Buy the book on Amazon

Big Lessons (or tl;dr version):

  • Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products or services.
  • It’s better to be first than it is to be better.
  • Create a category that you can be first in — and make sure that the category is supported by a singular word.
  • Fight the leader by not being better, but being their opposite.
  • Don’t extend your brand through line extension; it rarely works. Plus, your brand is not the one that works, it’s the association with something.
  • Study your customers, market and trends to find the “one move” that works.

Notes

Chapter 1: The Law of Leadership

  • It’s better to be first than it is to be better.
  • The basic issue in marketing is not convincing prospects that you have a better product or service. The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in.
  • It’s much easier to get into the mind first than to try to convince someone you have a better product than the one who got there first.
  • The leading brand in any category is almost always the first brand into the prospect’s mind. E.g Hertz in rent-a-cars, IBM in computers, Coca-Cola in cola.
  • Not every first is going to be successful. The timing could be an issue — for e.g your first could be too late.
  • Some firsts are also just bad…

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