Quotes from Al Ries

A company can become incredibly successful if it can find a way to own a word in the mind of the prospect. Not a complicated word. Not an invented one. The simple words are best, words taken right out of the dictionary. This is the law of focus. You "burn" your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept. It's the ultimate marketing sacrifice.

And the regulatory agencies are not stingy with their words either. Consider this: The Lord's Prayer contains 56 words; the Gettysburg Address, 266; the Ten Commandments, 297; the Declaration of Independence, 300; and a recent U.S. government order setting the price of cabbage, 26,911.

If "what is the size of the market?" is the first question your company asks itself, then you are taking the wrong road to success.

Aflac, the company that brought us the duck. In the year 2000, the company had a name recognition of 12 percent. Today it's 94 percent. And sales have gone up just as dramatically. Aflac sales in the American market went up 29 percent the first year after the duck arrived. And 28 percent the second year. And 18 percent the third year.

If you want to build a successful brand, you have to understand divergence. You have to look for opportunities to create new categories by divergence of existing categories. And then you have to become the first brand in this emerging new category.

According to a recent Spencer Stuart survey, a company's chief marketing officer has the shortest tenure of any top executive. "This job is radioactive

You can change "words" in a marketing program, but heaven help you if you try to change a

It's a conundrum. "Marketing is too important," said David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, "to be left to the marketing people." On the other hand, marketing is too complicated to be left to management people who have little experience in marketing and who don't understand its principles.

But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.

Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less.

The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity.

It normally takes decades to build a brand... It's the forgetting of the old truth that allows a person to accept a new truth. You need to allow enough time for this forgetting to take place

The best way to make news is to announce a new category, not a new product.

A branding program should be designed to differentiate your cow from all the other cattle on the range. Even if all the cattle on the range look pretty much alike.

The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospects mind.