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

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

To build a quality brand you need to narrow the focus and combine that narrow focus with a better name and a higher price.

Brand building is boring work. What works best is absolute consistency over an extended period of time.

When you broaden your brand, you weaken it.

The most efficient, most productive, most useful aspect of branding is creating a new category. In other words, narrowing the focus to nothing and starting something totally new.

Never forget leadership. No matter how small the market, don’t get duped into simply selling the benefits of the category early in the branding process.

Brands are used as personality statements. (Some marketing people call these statements “badges.”) Your choice of a badge is often determined by the statement you want to make to friends, neighbors, coworkers, or relatives.

Advertising is a powerful tool, not to build leadership of a fledgling brand, but to maintain that leadership once it is obtained. Companies that want to protect their well-established brands should not hesitate to use massive advertising programs to smother the competition.

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.