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

Your brand should welcome healthy competition. It often brings more customers into the category.

Customers don’t really care about new brands, they care about new categories. They don’t care about Domino’s; they care about whether or not their pizza will arrive in thirty minutes. They don’t care about Callaway; they care about whether or not an oversize driver will cut strokes off their golf scores. They don’t care about Prince; they care abou

So you can forget about the laundry list of wonderful attributes your product has. You can’t possibly associate them all with your brand name in a human mind. 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 catego

Words are the key to brand building.

When you don’t have the leading brand, your best strategy is to create a new category in which you can claim leadership.

Run up a red flag whenever you hear the words: “Why should we limit ourselves?” You should limit your brand. That’s the essence of branding. Your brand has to stand for something both simple and narrow in the mind. This limitation is the essential part of the branding process.

Strategy should be developed first from a publicity point of view.

Let sleeping brands lie. Before you launch your next line extension, ask yourself what customers of your current brand will think when they see the line extension.

One reason 90 percent of all new brands are line extensions is that management measures results with the wrong end of the ruler. It measures only the success of the extension. It never measures the erosion of the core brand. And it’s not just the erosion, it’s also the lost opportunities.