If you want to build a brand, you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind. A word that nobody else owns.
Successful brands get into the mind slowly. A blurb in a magazine. A mention in a newspaper. A comment from a friend. A display in a retail store. After a slow buildup, people become convinced that they have known about the brand forever.
A successful branding program is based on the concept of singularity. It creates in the mind of the prospect the perception that there is no product on the market quite like your product.
To get into the consumer’s mind, you have to sacrifice. You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute. An attribute that nobody else already owns in your category.
Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.
Marketing is not selling. Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the prospect.
What’s your brand? If you can’t answer that question about your own brand in two or three words, your brand’s in trouble.
Positioning is how you differentiate yourself in the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.
Marketing is what a company is in business to do. Marketing is a company’s ultimate objective.
The best way to make news is to announce a new category, not a new product.
Changing the direction of a large company is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier. It takes a mile before anything happens. And if it was a wrong turn, getting back on course takes even longer.
The next generation product almost never comes from the previous generation.
Advertising is the way great brands get to be great brands.
Your brand’s power lies in dominance. It is better to have 50% of one market, instead of 10% of five markets.
Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills.
War and marketing have many similarities.
The Internet is the ultimate in brand-centered buying.
The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospects mind.
Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less.
Everyone is interested in what‘s new. Few people are interested in what‘s better.