advertising

Book Summary of Oversubscribed by Daniel Priestley

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“Oversubscribed” by Daniel Priestley is a business guide that advocates generating more demand than supply before selling, reducing risk and increasing profits. It is divided into two parts, with the first focusing on building demand and the second on marketing campaigns. The book also includes comparisons with other influential business books and actionable advice on creating remarkable products.

Create More Demand Than You Can Meet

This section focuses on the key lesson of Oversubscribed: To increase profits, attract more customers than you can serve. The benefits of word-of-mouth advertising are also discussed, along with strategies for getting people talking about your business. According to Priestley, this is the most effective way to create demand for your product.

The Core Message: Exploit the Law of Supply and Demand

Oversubscribed aims to increase profits by creating more demand than can be met. Priestley explains that the law of supply and demand affects pricing: high demand allows for high prices and significant profit. Additionally, popular and scarce products continue to generate demand. Therefore, continued advertising is crucial even after demand exceeds supply.

Build Demand Through Word-of-Mouth

Oversubscribed emphasizes the importance of attracting more customers than can be handled, with a significant portion of the book devoted to methods of achieving this goal. Priestley cautions against mass marketing strategies such as commercials and printed ads, which are less effective due to people’s general weariness of being advertised to.

Instead, he advocates for word-of-mouth marketing, which has become more effective than ever thanks to social media. People are more likely to buy products that their friends are using, and social media allows for easy and rapid sharing of information about companies and products.

Here are ways to make people talk about your company:

  1. Be remarkable and unique to stand out.
  2. Undercut competitors’ prices to gain a competitive edge. IKEA is an example.
  3. Offer a more convenient product or service. Streaming services replaced cable TV due to convenience.

Method 2: Advertise Your Company, Not Just Your Products

To build brand loyalty and withstand competition, create a market niche by designing your company’s image. Advertise company values, such as supporting a charity or offering good employee benefits. Additionally, prioritize good customer service and use surveys to improve it.

Drive Interest With Campaigns

To make your business profitable, Priestley advises being a campaign manager, not just a salesperson. Connect with large numbers of people through special events and mailing lists. Priestley’s method for a successful marketing campaign has five phases, which we’ve organized into five steps:

  1. Connect with potential customers through special events and mailing lists.
  2. Build interest with informative and engaging content.
  3. Offer a low-risk way for customers to try your product or service.
  4. Sell your product or service.
  5. Deliver and celebrate your success while continuously innovating.

Step 1: Determine Your Supply

To plan a successful campaign, Priestley recommends determining your business’s capacity in terms of how many customers you can serve and how often. This will vary depending on your business model, such as handmade clothing with limited orders versus a family restaurant serving many customers daily.

Step 2: Prime the Market

To sell successfully, you need to know your target audience and communicate with them clearly. Determine if your ideal customers want and can afford your product, then send regular newsletters to keep them interested. Priestley also suggests offering subscriptions for updates about specific products to maintain the relationship with your customers and gauge their interest.

Step 3: Reach Critical Mass

Priestley’s Oversubscribed emphasizes the importance of having more demand than you can fulfill. To determine the appropriate level of interest before launching your product, Priestley outlines three goals. If you meet at least one, you’re ready to sell:

  1. If there is strong interest, sell when engagement is five times the amount of product, which could be demonstrated through preorders and deposits.
  2. If there is moderate interest, sell when engagement is 10 times the amount of product, which could be shown by event attendance and mailing list signups.
  3. If there is mild interest, sell when engagement is 100 times the amount of product, which could be indicated by clicks, views, and downloads.

Step 4: Make the Sales

After generating enough interest in your product, the next step is to make sales. While this should be a straightforward process, many new companies struggle with it. They feel uneasy about asking for personal information and money, leading to wasted time and failed deals.

However, it’s important to remember that a sales conversation means the customer is already interested in your product, so there’s no need to feel uncomfortable. Simply collect the information and money you need to close the deal confidently.

Step 5: Keep People Talking

After making sales, Priestley suggests exceeding customer expectations to excite them and start the next marketing campaign. This could include free samples or small gifts. You can achieve this by setting customer expectations slightly lower at the start.

However, research suggests that making the most appealing promises you can live up to is the best approach, as exceeding promises doesn’t necessarily make customers happier. Lastly, when starting the next campaign, highlight your business’s success to create demand.

Book Summary of How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp

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Sharp’s “How Brands Grow” challenges common marketing myths and proposes new empirical rules. He advocates for mass marketing to attract new customers and focuses on making brands memorable rather than unique. Sharp asserts that mass marketing is still the most effective way to grow.

Rule #1: Market to New Customers, Never to Existing Customers

Sharp challenges the common belief that retaining existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. He argues that data suggests marketing to new customers can be more profitable than to existing ones.

Focus on Value Over Retention or Acquisition

Sharp’s view on customer retention versus acquisition is challenged by some who suggest that an effective marketing strategy should focus on retaining or acquiring the most valuable customers, identified by their customer lifetime value (CLV).

Tim Ferriss used this approach to increase profits by identifying and nurturing his top five most valuable clients, who generated 95% of his profits. By adopting a CLV-oriented approach, marketers can prioritize the retention and acquisition of the most valuable customers, regardless of the initial cost, as they have the potential to drive a significant portion of sales.

The Fixed Pattern of Brand Growth

Sharp argues that brand growth primarily comes from acquiring new customers, not from retaining existing ones or increasing their purchase frequency.

He discovered this through analyzing financial data from multiple brands, which showed a “fixed pattern of brand growth” where market penetration increases dramatically with market share, while customer retention and purchase frequency only increase slightly. Based on this data, Sharp suggests that brands should focus on acquiring new customers to achieve growth.

Marketing Strategies That Fail

Sharp advises against loyalty programs and promotional discounts for existing customers, which he believes are ineffective for brand growth.

However, existing customers still play a role in attracting new customers through word-of-mouth. Blanchard and Bowles offer tips on using customer service as an outreach tool to acquire new customers, such as collecting and acting on feedback, keeping employees happy, and setting realistic expectations.

Why Loyalty Programs Fail

Marketing to existing buyers is generally a waste of money as they tend to make purchases without intervention. Loyalty programs aim to incentivize existing customers to buy more often, but data shows that members don’t buy any more frequently than non-members.

This is because people generally only buy when they need something, and their purchase schedules are fixed. Sharp argues that marketing to new customers is more effective, as it waits for consumers to need a product and then influences them to choose your brand over competitors.

Why Promotional Discounts Fail

Sharp suggests that promotional discounts are not a profitable way to increase sales to existing customers. While discounts may seem like an effective way to encourage repeat purchases, they can ultimately decrease profit margins and reduce future sales.

Business brand scribbled on a notepad

Rule #2: Market to Everyone, Never to a Specific Demographic

In Rule #1, we learned that marketers profit more from getting new customers rather than focusing on customer loyalty. Rule #2 shows how marketers often fail to market to new customers effectively. Sharp believes that targeting a specific demographic may not increase sales, and instead recommends marketing to as many demographics as possible.

Most Market Divisions Don’t Exist

Sharp suggests that targeting specific demographics is often ineffective since markets are less segmented than believed. Competing brands often share similar customer bases, and consumers purchase a range of products depending on their mood.

Marketers who assume a narrow market risk missing out on potential customers and setting low sales goals. Therefore, marketers should aim for a broader audience to attract more customers.

Evidence That Most Market Divisions Don’t Exist

Sharp provides evidence to support his claim that most companies operate in mass markets. He suggests analyzing the overlap between the customer bases of two brands to determine their competition.

According to Sharp, specialized brands assumed to serve niche markets have the same percentage of buyers with their niche competitors as generic brands, indicating they are competing in the mass market. Therefore, most market niches do not exist.

Rule #3: Market to Be Memorable, Not Unique

How can marketers surpass their competitors when traditional marketing methods fail? By understanding consumer decision-making and using it to influence brand preference.

How Consumers Choose Which Brand to Buy

Consumers don’t prioritize branding in their purchasing decisions, making targeted marketing ineffective. Even if a brand is perceived as “trendy” or “wholesome,” opinions often change. Most consumers don’t compare brands and instead buy without much thought.

People have adapted to the brand-filled world by filtering out branded messaging. Crafting a compelling value proposition may not be enough to break through their mental filters.

Consumers Buy Whatever Brand Is Present

Sharp suggests that consumers don’t evaluate many options when deciding which brand to buy. Instead, they choose from a few immediate options, either physically or conceptually present.

Brand recognition and frequency of thinking about a brand matter more than consumer perception. If a customer recognizes a brand and briefly considers buying it, they’re more likely to purchase it over a competitor’s brand they don’t recognize.

Increase Your Presence With Memorable Branding

Sharp suggests that to market your brand effectively, you should increase the likelihood that consumers will think about it. This can be achieved by advertising regularly to create brand memories, using recognizable brand assets consistently, and expanding your brand’s reach to increase its visibility.

Strategy #1: Advertise Regularly

Sharp suggests that regular advertising can create brand memories, increasing the likelihood that consumers will consider your brand in the future.

Memorable ads that grab the audience’s attention and emotionally engage them work best, even if they’re not logically persuasive. However, the ad must prominently connect to the brand in a memorable way, or the audience may not remember the brand when it’s time to choose which one to buy.

Strategy #2: Create Recognizable Brand Assets and Keep Them Consistent

Sharp suggests creating recognizable brand assets such as a logo, color scheme, and memorable brand name. When potential customers recognize these assets, they’ll recall positive memories of your brand and be more likely to buy.

To maintain this connection, it’s crucial to keep these assets consistent throughout your brand’s lifespan. Changing them increases the likelihood of your audience ignoring your brand entirely, as the link to past experiences is removed.

Strategy #3: Expand Your Brand’s Reach

To increase brand visibility, Sharp suggests expanding through various channels and making it easier for consumers to notice your product. This includes using recognizable signs, appearing on search engines, and being readily available in stores. The more often consumers see your brand, the more likely they are to recall it and make a purchase.

Book Summary of Ogilvy On Advertising by David Ogilvy

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David Ogilvy founded his own advertising agency in 1949 after working as a salesman, copywriter, and adman for years. His agency became one of the world’s most successful, and in 1985, he wrote Ogilvy on Advertising, a comprehensive guide to marketing, creating effective ads, and the industry as a whole.

Marketing and Product Development

To increase sales, good products are crucial. Research is important to determine preferences for smells, colors, flavors, features, and packaging. Quality improvement, balancing convention and novelty, and an appropriate price with promotions can also help. A memorable name and successful launch are key. Focus on successes and convince consumers to try the product.

The Craft of Advertising

Advertising aims to increase profit by attracting new customers or encouraging existing customers to buy more. Effective advertising can significantly boost sales, even for products that already sell well. To create good ads, follow these steps:

  1. Learn about the product to generate associations and potential benefits.
  2. Study competitor’s ads, particularly direct-response ads.
  3. Use research to understand your target audience, product promise, promotions, and media.
  4. Choose a brand image.
  5. By researching and allowing your mind to naturally make connections, you may come up with grand, timeless concepts.
  6. Spotlight the product and make it the star, even if it’s not unique.
  7. Stay away from committee work. The final advertisement frequently says nothing significant since committees frequently confuse issues and demand compromise.

Print Advertising

Print ads are ads in magazines, newspapers or on posters. There are five key elements to consider when creating a print ad: headline, imagery, copy, coupon, and layout.

  1. A great headline is essential as most people read only the headline.
  2. Effective imagery makes the reader curious or tells a story.
  3. Good copy should use the second person, be simple, interesting and specific, and include a story or consumer testimonials.
  4. Coupons should contain a small image, the promise, and the brand name.
  5. The layout should be easy to read and resemble an editorial page to increase readership.

TV Advertising

TV advertising is about commercials and there are six key elements to consider when creating them. These include the structure, the brand and product name, visuals, sound, supers (text overlaid on the video), and costs.

Effective commercials have a “slice of life” structure, feature unusual characters, and are funny, sentimental, fact-based, or newsworthy. It’s important to mention the brand name early and often, show someone using the product, and show the product and packaging at the end.

Use sound effects and avoid voiceovers, and add supers to reiterate your message. Finally, reduce costs by cutting unnecessary complications.

Radio Advertising

When the book was published, radio advertising only accounted for 6% of U.S. advertising and its effectiveness was difficult to measure. Based on a pilot study and his own observations, Ogilvy offers five tips for creating effective radio ads:

  1. Capture people’s attention with surprises, humor, or charm.
  2. Speak to the audience in a conversational manner.
  3. Mention the brand name and promise early in the commercial.
  4. Repeat the brand name and promise throughout the commercial.
  5. Create multiple commercials to avoid listener annoyance and maximize exposure.

Specific Types of Advertising

There are challenges specific to certain types of products, services, and companies, including:

  1. Corporate advertising can improve a company’s reputation, recruitment efforts, and more, but requires a longer-term commitment and legislative advertising may not be considered a business expense.
  2. Tourism advertising involves navigating politics and stereotypes about the country being advertised.
  3. Cause advertising may not bring in much money, but can raise awareness and lead to successful personal solicitation.
  4. Commodity products lack uniqueness, so it’s best to differentiate your company rather than the product by offering lower cost, better quality, or service.

Industry Overview

Working in Advertising

To succeed in the competitive advertising industry, one must have passion. Agency work involves various roles such as copywriters, art directors, account executives, researchers, media buyers, creative directors, and CEOs. Copywriters create written content, art directors handle visuals, account executives act as intermediaries, researchers analyze effectiveness, media departments buy ad space, creative directors oversee production, and CEOs manage and attract clients.

Running an Advertising Agency

To run a successful agency, you need: talented and skilled staff, a solid understanding of office politics, high standards of conduct, a payment system, good investments, and clients.

  • To ensure a talented staff, recruit people smarter than you and with different talents.
  • To avoid politics, fire the worst offenders and organize team-building activities. Set high standards of conduct, including client confidentiality and only using clients’ products.
  • Choose a payment system that suits your agency. Good investments include opening new offices or purchasing your office building.
  • Attract new clients by producing good advertising for existing clients, and use successful work to show potential clients.

To attract new clients, Ogilvy recommends the following:

  1. Give presentations to convince clients to hire your agency, and send a follow-up letter summarizing why they should choose you.
  2. Advertise your agency through direct mail or consistent space advertising.
  3. Sign up multinational accounts to potentially gain worldwide opportunities.

However, Ogilvy also advises caution when taking on new clients. Avoid or drop clients who can’t pay, have a different company culture, are failing, or are bullies.

Finding an Agency

To find the right advertising agency, start by reviewing ads in magazines and on TV that you admire. Create a list of agencies responsible for those ads and eliminate those working with your competitors. Meet with the heads and creative directors of the remaining agencies and ask to see their top six print and TV ads. Choose the agency with the most compelling campaigns and offer to pay 1% more than their usual fee and sign a five-year contract to secure their services.

Public Opinion on Advertising

Critics rank adpeople as low as car salespeople in honesty, but Ogilvy argues that advertising is not inherently immoral and can have positive effects.

Ads go through many levels of approval before running, except for political advertising, which can be dishonest. Advertising may only convince someone to buy an inferior product once. Agencies were creating less informative ads and billboards were considered dangerous and ugly at the time of writing.

Book Summary of The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy

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Dan Kennedy’s The Ultimate Sales Letter teaches effective strategies for crafting compelling sales letters that drive sales. The book provides timeless foundational strategies in persuasive writing that remain relevant in today’s ever-changing sales and marketing landscape. Kennedy is a self-made millionaire and successful copywriter who believes anyone can learn to write persuasive copy and turn it into profit with self-belief, intuition, and product knowledge.

Our guide simplifies and categorizes Dan Kennedy’s tips and strategies into two main parts:

1) Collecting necessary information to create a potent sales letter and

2) Creating an enticing sales letter.

Furthermore, we compare and contrast Kennedy’s ideas with current suggestions from other experts in the sales and marketing field.

Part 1: Gather Your Sales Letter Intel

In this segment, we’ll cover the groundwork that Kennedy recommends for crafting a persuasive sales letter. We’ll begin with identifying and comprehending your intended audience, followed by gaining extensive knowledge of your product.

Step 1: Identify and Understand Your Target Customer

To write an effective sales letter, Kennedy stresses the importance of understanding your target customer’s interests, concerns, and communication style. He advises researching their demographics, trends, and past experiences with similar products. Gathering information can be done through industry immersion, attending trade shows, and speaking with those who have insights into your customer base.

Step 2: Know Your Product

Kennedy emphasizes the importance of becoming thoroughly familiar with your product to showcase its benefits and address any drawbacks in your sales letter. He recommends using your product extensively, testing it, taking it apart, talking to people who use it, and examining competitive products. This process helps you identify its best features and benefits, which you can prioritize and highlight in your sales letter based on the unique needs and interests of your target customers.

Kennedy insists that addressing your product’s limitations in your sales letter is crucial to alleviate any customer concerns and maintain their interest in purchasing.

He recommends two tactics for handling potential buyer questions:

1) Share results from research conducted on consumers who didn’t buy your product, list every reason given for not purchasing, and provide solutions for each issue.

2) Offer a list of frequently asked questions and their corresponding answers. Kennedy suggests reinforcing these tactics with testimonials and stories highlighting your product’s strengths, or offering guarantees and free trial offers to encourage customers to try your product.

Part 2: Craft Your Sales Letter

After discussing the necessary background information in the previous section, we will now delve into five key steps to create a compelling sales letter that captures customers’ attention and motivates them to buy your product. Finally, we’ll discuss strategies for effectively distributing your well-crafted letter to your target audience.

Step 1: Compose your first article

After gathering all the necessary information about your customer and product, Kennedy advises that the first step in creating your sales letter is to start writing, without worrying about perfection or editing.

Step 2: Capture, Interact, Persuade, and Compel

To shape your sales letter effectively, Kennedy recommends four key goals: capture, interact, persuade, and compel your customer. Here are his recommendations for achieving each:

  • To Capture: Start your letter by addressing a problem your product solves, using attention-grabbing headlines and teasers.
  • To Interact: Use short sentences and paragraphs, and break language conventions by utilizing exclamation points, trendy terms, and unusual punctuation.
  • To Persuade: Highlight the benefits and features of your product, using customer testimonials, stories, and data to back up your claims.
  • To Compel: Provide a clear call-to-action, such as a limited-time offer, guarantee, or free trial, to motivate customers to respond immediately.

Kennedy offers two strategies to de-emphasize price in your sales letter and shift the focus to reasons why customers should buy your product. The first strategy is to pitch the value or savings customers will experience and emphasize long-term benefits. The second strategy is to use persuasion techniques such as implying that smart people buy your product or offering product guarantees.

Step 3: Refine, Finalize, and Send Your Letter

To finalize your letter and ensure it reaches your target customer, follow these tips from Kennedy:

  • Add a persuasive PS at the end of your letter.
  • Edit your letter for clarity and remove irrelevant phrases.
  • Make your letter visually appealing by emphasizing key points with bold, highlighting or capital letters.
  • Test your letter by reading it out loud, getting feedback from others, and comparing it to similar letters.
  • Personalize your packaging for executives with high-quality paper and exclusive language, or use colorful, interactive materials for mass mailings.
  • Hand-address the envelope, omit the name of the return address, and utilize postage instead of metered mail to prevent it from seeming like junk mail.
  • For delivery assurance, select Federal express or first-class mail.
  • Once you’ve made the final edits, send out your letter and wait for the response.

Kennedy suggests strategic ways to use your sales letter, such as sending follow-up letters to improve response rates and using the letter for lead identification, telemarketing, and event announcements. Despite changes in communication channels, Kennedy argues that written sales letters remain effective, and a combination of online and offline sales letters is best. Additionally, a combination of video sales strategies, including commercials and sales letters, can further enhance effectiveness.

Book Summary of Positioning by Al Ries

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Al Ries and Jack Trout’s book, ‘Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,’ offers marketing tips based on their over 20 years of experience. The book, published in 1981, is the first of many collaborations between the authors, who are experts on marketing strategy. We’ll explore their definition of positioning and techniques, and discuss how it can be applied to career development.

What Is Positioning?

Ries and Trout define “positioning” as shaping customer perceptions of your product in comparison to competitors. A product’s “position” is its unique identity in consumers’ minds. For example, a Ferrari is a luxury sports car, while a Corvette is an iconic sports car that’s more affordable than a Ferrari. These mental associations represent each product’s “position.”

What Does Positioning Look Like?

Positioning is primarily achieved through advertising, which serves as a means of communication according to Ries and Trout. To shape perceptions of your product, you must convey a message that affects how people view it relative to other products.

However, the authors acknowledge that advertising can be intrusive since we are inundated with countless ads from various sources, leading us to tune most of them out.

Guidelines for Positioning-Based Advertising

Ries and Trout offer three recommendations for crafting effective ads that can break through the mental filter and shape customer perception.

  1. Firstly, simplify the message, as our brains can only store and process a limited amount of information.
  2. Secondly, align your message with your customer’s existing understanding of reality, as people are more likely to accept messages that confirm their beliefs.
  3. Lastly, maintain a consistent message over time, as people are resistant to changing their minds, while updating your ads to keep them current.

Preliminary Positioning Strategy

Ries and Trout emphasize the importance of three factors to successfully position your product:

  1. Firstly, comprehending your present position.
  2. Secondly, identifying a feasible and desired position.
  3. Lastly, selecting a name that aligns with the desired position.
  4. Comprehending Your Present Position

Ries and Trout caution that it is crucial to understand how your potential customers perceive your business and how your competitors compare. They also advise investing in research, such as surveys, to gain clarity and make informed decisions.

2- Identifying A Feasible and Desired Position

Ries and Trout advise having a realistic and clear vision of the position you desire for your product. Ideally, positioning as a market leader is recommended as it offers various benefits like brand loyalty, ease of attracting good employees, and higher stock prices. Being a leading product/company helps in creating self-perpetuating success.

Ries and Trout suggest that market leaders have significant advantages and become entrenched, making it difficult for competitors to supplant them with a better product. Instead, they recommend becoming the first to occupy the leading position by finding or creating a niche where you can make a credible claim of market leadership. This often involves sacrificing your product’s general appeal to target a niche where you can be the first to claim leadership.

Find Your Niche

By changing various facets of your product or advertising to stand out, Ries and Trout offer the following strategies for finding an open niche:

  • Product Size: Offer a miniature version if the industry trend is towards large products, or vice versa.
  • Price: Create premium or economy versions of a product to offer profitable niche opportunities.
  • Demographics: Tailor your product and advertising to appeal to an untapped gender or age group.
  • Setting: Target your product for use in a particular place, climate, season, or time of day.
  • Distribution: Consider novel approaches to enhance your customers’ shopping experiences, such creative packaging.
  1. Selecting A Name That Aligns with The Desired Position

Ries and Trout stress the significance of a product’s name for positioning, as it’s what consumers use to mentally position it in the market. The name should be unique, memorable, and representative of the positioning strategy.

Additionally, they advise that a company name should accurately reflect the company’s role and that an outdated or non-representative name can hinder growth.

Consider Your Abbreviations

Ries and Trout caution against using awkward acronyms and recommend creating phonetic ones, such as NASA, for better memorability. However, acronyms should align with your positioning strategy and avoid sounding contradictory to your message, as in the case of using “FAT” for a fitness program.

Additional Naming Pitfalls

Ries and Trout warn that unclear names hinder product positioning. Customers struggle to mentally place them in the market landscape, making it vital to choose a name that reflects the product’s market position. For example, “W Magazine” can be misleading as it covers art and fashion, not finances or women’s issues.

  • Ries and Trout warn that names can become outdated as cultures and businesses evolve. Even if a product or company remains the same, changes in language or culture can make a name obsolete and less effective in resonating with prospective customers.
  • Ries and Trout suggest changing technical product names developed by engineers before bringing them to the market, as such names are often meaningless to outsiders.
  • Ries and Trout suggest that having a name too similar to a competitor’s name can make it challenging to establish your own distinct position in the market.

Positioning Strategy

Once you’ve assessed your current position, envisioned a realistic goal, and confirmed your name aligns with it, how can you solidify your position as the market leader? Ries and Trout offer various strategies depending on whether you’re already the leader or striving to become one.

Strategy for an Established Market Leader

To maintain market leadership, reinforcing your position may suffice. But, Ries and Trout suggest that advertising your product as the best won’t persuade customers. They recommend promoting yourself as the original and genuine article. As leaders usually occupy their positions first, this claim is credible and suggests competing products are imitations, giving people a reason to buy from you.

Strategy for an Aspiring Market Leader

If you’ve found a valuable, unexplored niche, you can become a market leader by creating a product that meets demand, choosing a fitting name, and launching a successful ad campaign, according to Ries and Trout. However, they emphasize the importance of meeting customer expectations and repositioning the competition in this scenario.

Appeal to Expectations

To effectively communicate a message, it’s best to align with people’s expectations. Ries and Trout suggest that if you introduce a new product, it’s essential to compare it to something familiar to consumers. They use the example of marketing early cars as “horseless carriages.”

Reposition the Competition

To gain a market advantage, Ries and Trout advise discrediting competitors by repositioning their product. Merely claiming superiority is ineffective. Instead, expose a deficiency in the current leading product to create an opening for a new niche leader. Ries and Trout note that bad news about a competitor is more effective than good news about your product. For example, a pharmaceutical company can highlight side effects of gender-neutral vaccines on women’s health to promote a new flu vaccine.

Strategy for an Established Leader Entering a New Market

If you’re a market leader with one product and want to launch a new one in a different sector, Ries and Trout advise creating a new brand for the new product. This avoids the pitfalls of line extensions, which we’ll discuss next.

The Pitfalls of Line Extensions

“Line extension” is a term used by Ries and Trout to describe adding new products to an existing line under the same name. Products are distinguished with descriptions or other qualifiers. While line extensions provide instant brand recognition and save on marketing costs, Ries and Trout advise against them due to brand dilution and internal competition.

Brand Dilution

Ries and Trout argue that line extensions weaken a brand’s position by diluting its collective essence. A brand associated with diverse products and market positions becomes harder for customers to identify, and thus weaker. For example, if Ferrari started selling economical cars, it would dilute its high-end sports car brand and lose its meaning.

Professional Positioning for Career Success

Ries and Trout believe that the principles of positioning can be applied to advance one’s career. The strategy they recommend includes understanding your current position, identifying your desired position, selecting a suitable name, and charting a course to your desired position.

Understanding your current position involves being aware of how others perceive your strengths and weaknesses. To identify your desired position, you need to realistically determine what professional positioning you want, and this might involve finding an open niche.

Your name is also an important element of how people perceive you, and Ries and Trout recommend avoiding initials and using a name that supports your desired positioning.

Charting a course involves finding a good fit between your values and goals and your company’s vision and goals. In applying for new positions, you should emphasize how your strengths match the company’s strengths.

Ries and Trout stress the need for persistence in positioning as it is a long-term endeavor.

Book Summary of Purple Cow by Seth Godin

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Seth Godin and his family were thrilled to see many cows during their vacation in France. But soon, the excitement faded away as all the cows looked the same. They realized that only a purple cow would be remarkable and exciting.

This principle applies to product development and marketing. Creating an ordinary product like all the others won’t grab attention. You need a remarkable and exciting product, a Purple Cow, to stand out.

Mass Marketing Doesn’t Work Anymore

Traditional mass marketing techniques like TV commercials and newspaper ads are no longer as effective as they used to be because people today have less money, time, and attention to spare. Trying to target as many people as possible is not the way to go, as most of them won’t even listen to you.

To get attention for your product, you need to target the right people who fall into a bell curve: the innovators and early adopters, who will then market your product to the majority. Your Purple Cow must be remarkable enough to attract the innovators and flexible enough to appeal to the majority, once they hear about it from a source they trust.

Find Your Cow by Taking Risks

To find your Purple Cow, you need to look for extremes in your products, advertisements, image, and pricing. Identify the absolute limits of possibility, even if you don’t plan to go that far. Playing it safe is risky in today’s world of brown cows, and copying someone else’s success won’t make your product remarkable.

You need to stand out and catch the attention of innovators and early adopters who will spread the word. The Four Seasons and Motel 6 are examples of exceptional brands that succeeded by being opposite extremes in the hotel industry.

What Remarkable Doesn’t Mean

Common misconceptions about remarkability include mistaking “good” for remarkable, thinking that being ridiculous is the same as being remarkable, and relying on cheap pricing to make a product remarkable.

Good products with broad appeal are often boring and more likely to fail. Being ridiculous may attract attention, but not the right kind. Similarly, cheap pricing is not enough to make a product remarkable and can lead to a price war with competitors.

What’s Next?

Creating a single remarkable product isn’t enough to sustain a business forever. Milk it for all it’s worth by passing it on to another team and extracting maximum profits.

Then, invest the profits into developing your next big thing. Keep the Purple Cow cycle going to stay at the forefront of your industry.

But don’t churn out mediocre products just for the sake of it. Wait until you have your next remarkable idea. Remember, playing it safe is the riskiest move in today’s age of the Purple Cow.