Review: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout

This book is a good overview of basic marketing principles, but the so-called “immutable laws” are neither laws nor immutable. They are, at best, rules of thumb that often change and contradict each other. The book itself contains plenty of examples of this! For example, they talk at length about the “Law of Extension”, and how successful brands should never extend their product line to new products/markets, but in later chapters, you see a few successful examples of companies doing exactly that. Moreover, the book is dated. They talk extensively about how essential it is to be first in the market (“Law of Leadership”), but there are a huge number of modern examples that became wildly successful despite violating this “law”, including Google (not the first search engine), Facebook (not the first social network), LinkedIn (not the first professional network or job site), and many others.

An even bigger problem with this book is that it’s observational and not predictive. Whereas laws of science allow you to predict what will happen in the future (e.g. the law of gravity allows you to predict how to planets will move in space), the “laws” in this book merely describe something that happened in the past. The authors try to determine cause and effect from these past events, but correlation does not imply causation. For example, the book talks about IBM being wildly profitable while they focused on one business line and then barely surviving after starting to work on multiple business lines. If this was a controlled experiment and the only thing that changed was that IBM started to work on multiple business lines, the “Law of Extension” would be a reasonable explanation. But the world isn’t static. IBM could’ve started to struggle for dozens of other reasons: competitors introduced new products, new technologies were developed, the quality of IBM’s products decreased, and so on.

All that said, this book is still valuable as a collection of interesting marketing case studies and as a way to get into the mind of a marketer. Some of the useful ideas you’ll find:

• Perception is more important than product.
• Customers put products into “categories” that have more to do with marketing than product. For example, in the US, Honda is seen as a car maker, whereas in Japan, it’s seen as a motorcycle maker, even though it’s the same company with the same products.
• Once you’re in a category, it’s very hard to move, which is why using the same brand name on everything, even if it’s a powerful brand name, doesn’t always work (e.g. Heinz ketchup = good, Heinz salad = WTF).
• Your basic goal in marketing is to be #1 in your category. You can get there by dominating an existing category… or by creating a new category.
• Don’t be afraid to admit weaknesses and flaws. Candor can be disarming. People are naturally suspicious of anyone praising themselves, but if you admit a negative, most people a) automatically assume you’re telling the truth, b) assume if you’re willing to talk about a weakness, then you must have some amazing strengths, c) reflexively forgive you and become more open to the rest of your message.
• Focus your marketing on the leader’s weaknesses rather than their strengths. For example, if you make cars that compete with Volvo, marketing around “safety” won’t be as effective as marketing around “speed” or “fun” or “elegant design”.

I recommend skimming the book, and instead of accepting the authors’ interpretation of events and assuming they are teaching you immutable laws, file away these ideas as facets you should consider when developing a marketing strategy. I suppose it would be more accurate to call this book “22 rules of thumb about marketing,” but I’m sure that would violate one of their marketing laws…

As always, I saved a few of my favorite quotes from the book:

“The basic issue of marketing is creating a category you can be first in.”

“Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products.”

“Don’t try to be better. Try to be different.”

Rating: 3 stars