April 27th, 2008 | 
Author: This is the start of a new series of posts here at mgroves.com.
I’ve picked up a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout. It’s a shortish book with 22 easy to digest chapters, and I think I can squeeze out 22 even shorter blog posts in summary.
Does this sound boring? We’ll see how far this goes. I might not make it to 22.
Okay, on with the first chapter. If you’re really impatient, you can get a full summary here, but it’s much shorter.
Chapter 1. The Law of Leadership
It’s better to be first than it is to be better.
Who remembers #2? Who was the second man to cross the Atlantic ocean by solo flight? Who was the second man on the moon? You get the picture.
People tend to stick with what they have. This is partly because people are somewhat risk averse and partly because there may be a switching cost involved (which may not even be monetary).
So, because of this law, the “first” brand becomes the “leading” brand, with corresponding shares of sales. This also might lead to brand names becoming generic names for a product category: It’s not paper copying, it’s “Xeroxing”. It’s not facial tissue, it’s Kleenex. It’s not soda, it’s Coke. It’s not plastic wrap, it’s Saran Wrap. Etc.
One important thing to talk about, since this is the first of (maybe) 22 posts: this law isn’t the only law of marketing, because I’m sure you can think of some counterexamples to this first law that are probably covered in the other 21. We’ll see. I haven’t read the whole book yet.
Tags:
Its only “Coke” in states that aren’t smart enough to call it Pop.
http://www.mgroves.com/Pop,-soda,-coke,-tonic
The second man on the moon was Buzz Aldrin and he will mess you up for forgetting that.
I’ll just tell him you think he’s lying about the moon landing and he’ll punch you in the face.
In practical sense and in theory this is true. A recent example of the opposite of this is Google. There were many browsers before Google but Google ‘arguably’ became the best. Keep reading and keep bloging.
Well, Google isn’t a browser, but point taken. Stay tuned for the rest of the laws.
I think there are definitely ways to usurp a leader, but it takes some time and you really do just have to be better. For instance, with search engines, you generally want fast and accurate results, and Google provided that. They also provided a better interface (which allowed you to search faster and thus get results faster) and have just skyrocketed since.
MMOs and games in general are actually another area that I think it’s easy to “take over” — and it is probably due to the low cost of switching between them. People will quickly abandon a hastily released, bug-filled game for a more polished, developed game that comes out a few months later, and the original game will probably always have its name tarnished as a bad game among those who first played it, making it very difficult for them to recover. First impressions are often very lasting.
37Signals once said don’t worry about being first to the market just make sure you have the best product. Also, someone once said “don’t try to be a great man, just be a man, and let history make its own judgments.”
As we all know, though, 37Signals is junk. And Zefram Cochran (the guy from “Babe” and Jack Bauer’s dad) is hardly an expert on marketing.