The Immutable Laws of Marketing

July 07, 2020

Hi there,

Welcome to this week’s newsletter!

Two-Three days ago, I re-read the book 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout. This is one of my favorite books that I keep re-reading every few months. According to the author of this book, everything in this world is governed by laws and so is marketing.

As a marketer or a founder, it’s important for you to know about these laws.

In this week’s newsletter, I thought why not share my favorite laws from this book with you ( my marketing shots community). 

If you wish to learn about all the marketing laws, I highly recommend this book.

You cannot possibly apply all the laws but you can definitely pick the ones that suit your business.Here are my favorites:-

The Law of Category

If you can’t be the first in the category, create a new category and be the first in it. 

When you create a new category, you essentially have zero competition. 

Most of the ideas you think aren't unique or have been done several times before. That’s ok. You can still create a new sub-category and rule it!

For example, Firstcry and Amazon both are e-commerce marketplaces. The business is essentially the same but when you see the category they operate in, you will find Amazon is an everything store but Firstcry is a baby store. You will think of checking firstcry first for buying stuff for your babies. That’s because firstcry was the first to create an exclusive marketplace for baby products and became the leader in that category

The Law of Focus

This one’s hard to crack. It takes years and a lot of money to get this right. 

The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a “word” in your prospect’s mind.

If I were to ask you the following:

What’s the first company or brand that comes to your mind when I say the word “search”

100% of you reading this newsletter would say Google. This is one company that has used this law for most of its products.

Few more examples,

Videos -> Youtube 

Butter-> Amul

Coconut Hair Oil -> Parachute

Exercise for you: Think of a word you can own in your target audience’s mind and create your marketing campaigns around it.

The Law of Perspective

According to this law, your marketing activities should be designed keeping in mind the long term perspective of your customers. For example, sale offers. If you run a sale on your products in the first week of every month to achieve your short term sales goal, your customer’s perspective will change and they stop buying from you at regular price. They will wait for the sale.

The Law of Attribute

No two companies can own the same attribute in the mind of the consumers. Let me clarify this statement with an example. Consider the toothpaste brands in India.

For sensitivity protection, you have Sensodine

For solid gums, you have Colgate (Kya apke toothpaste me namak hai?)

For ayurvedic herbal toothpaste, you have Patanjali Dant Kanti

For mouth odour, you have Close-Up

See, how they are marketing on different attributes of the toothpaste.

Which law did you find useful? Let me know on

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