The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

By Al Ries and Jack Trout (1993)

The scene that opens the book

Picture a small airfield outside New York in May 1927. A young pilot climbs into a single-engine plane, taxis down a muddy strip, and lifts off into a thirty-three-hour flight that ends in Paris. His name is Charles Lindbergh, and within hours of landing he is the most famous person on earth. Now picture another pilot, a few months later, doing the same flight in less time on less fuel. His name is Bert Hinkler. You have never heard of him. His own wife reportedly never heard from him again. Same ocean, same achievement, better numbers, no fame.

Al Ries and Jack Trout open their book with this contrast because it captures everything they want to say. Marketing, they argue, is not a battle of better products. It is a battle to be first into the prospect's mind, and once you are there, almost nothing dislodges you. Lindbergh got there first. Hinkler got there second. The order of arrival decided the rest of the story.

The authors then walk the reader through the same pattern in business after business. IBM in mainframes. Coca-Cola in cola. Hertz in rent-a-cars. Heineken in imported beer. Tide in laundry detergent. Gillette in razor blades. Xerox in plain-paper copiers. In every case, the brand that arrived first owned a word in the prospect's mind, and that word kept paying dividends decades later. The latecomers, no matter how clever, no matter how well funded, were left fighting for scraps or forced to invent new categories where they could be first themselves.

This is not a soft observation about consumer psychology. The authors treat it as a law of nature, on the same footing as gravity. You can build a beautiful airplane, but if it violates the law of gravity it will not fly. You can build a beautiful marketing program, but if it violates the laws of marketing, it will fail. Their tone throughout the book is the tone of two men who have watched billions of dollars set on fire by smart, energetic, well-meaning executives who refused to believe that their product could not bend reality through sheer effort.