Al Ries Jack Trout Quotes

#1. Rachel Ries is a wonderful singer/performer/songwriter who writes her music with a literary and poetic style.

In an interview with Amanda Miller for Rumpus Magazine Rachel Ries listed some of her literary influences.

You can listen to her perform at this site too, if you've never heard her before.

Here is her list in the order she gave them:

Al Kennedy – Everything You Need
Umberto Eco – Foucault's Pendulum
China Miéville – Perdido Street Station
Everything by Tolkien
Jeannette Winterson
Dostoevsky – The Idiot
John Steinbeck – East of Eden
Willa Cather – Song of the Lark
Diana Gabaldon – Anything Outlander
Neil Gaiman – American Gods
Victor Hugo – Les Miserables
Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
Justin Cronin – The Passage
David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle #Quote by Rachel Ries

#2. War and marketing have many similarities. #Quote by Al Ries

#3. To get into the consumer's mind, you have to sacrifice. You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute. An attribute that nobody else already owns in your category. #Quote by Al Ries

#4. Don't play semantic games with the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It's a seduction. #Quote by Al Ries

#5. What's your brand? If you can't answer that question about your own brand in two or three words, your brand's in trouble. #Quote by Al Ries

#6. The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position. #Quote by Al Ries

#7. A successful branding program is based on the concept of singularity. It creates in the mind of the prospect the perception that there is no product on the market quite like your product. #Quote by Al Ries

#8. THE LAW OF THE GENERIC: One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a brand a generic name. #Quote by Al Ries

#9. If you want to build a brand, you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect's mind. A word that nobody else owns. #Quote by Al Ries

#10. The primary objective of a branding program is never the market for the product or service. The primary objective of a branding program is always the mind of the prospect. The mind comes first; the market follows where the mind leads. #Quote by Al Ries

#11. If you can build a powerful brand, you will have a powerful marketing program. If you CAN'T then all the advertising, fancy packaging, sales promotion and public relations in the world won't help you achieve your objective. #Quote by Al Ries

#12. A laser is a weak source of energy. A laser takes [only] a few watts of energy and focuses them in a coherent stream of light. But with a laser, you can drill a hole in a diamond or wipe out cancer. #Quote by Al Ries

#13. What should a brand leader advertise?Brand leadership, of course. Leadership is the single most important motivating factor in consumer behavior. #Quote by Al Ries

#14. Successful brands get into the mind slowly. A blurb in a magazine. A mention in a newspaper. A comment from a friend. A display in a retail store. After a slow buildup, people become convinced that they have known about the brand forever. #Quote by Al Ries

#15. A branding program should be designed to differentiate your cow from all the other cattle on the range. Even if all the cattle on the range look pretty much alike. #Quote by Al Ries

#16. Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills. #Quote by Al Ries

#17. A perception that exists in the mind is often interpreted as a universal truth. #Quote by Al Ries

#18. Positioning is how you differentiate yourself in the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect. #Quote by Al Ries

#19. You want to change something in a computer? Just type over or delete the existing material. You want to change something in a mind? Forget it. #Quote by Al Ries

#20. THE LAW OF THE CONTRACTION: A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus. #Quote by Al Ries

#21. The best way to make news is to announce a new category, not a new product. #Quote by Al Ries

#22. Today brands are born, not made. A new brand must be capable of generating favorable publicity in the media or it won't have a chance in the marketplace. And just how do you generate publicity? The best way to generate publicity is by being first. In other words, by being the first brand in a new category. #Quote by Al Ries

#23. The Internet is the ultimate in brand-centered buying. #Quote by Al Ries

#24. The real barrier (to building a brand) is the human mind. It normally takes decades to build a brand because it takes decades to penetrate the gray matter in between your ears. #Quote by Al Ries

#25. It's the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product. IBM didn't invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect's mind. #Quote by Al Ries

#26. It's better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace. #Quote by Al Ries

#27. companies are focused on building products rather than brands. A product is something made in a factory. A brand is something made in the mind. To be successful today, you have to build brands, not products. And you build brands by using positioning strategies, starting with a good name. Any #Quote by Al Ries

#28. Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products. #Quote by Al Ries

#29. Advertising is the way great brands get to be great brands. #Quote by Al Ries

#30. Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. #Quote by Al Ries

#31. A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer. #Quote by Al Ries

#32. Marketing is what a company is in business to do. Marketing is a company's ultimate objective. #Quote by Al Ries

#33. My mother was addicted to being rich, to servants and unlimited charge accounts, to giving lavish dinner parties, to taking frequent first-class trips to Europe. So one might say she was tormented by withdrawal symptoms all through the Great Depression. She was acculturated! Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction, can do that to people quicker than you can say "Jack Robinson." As Trout wrote in his "An American Family Marooned on the Planet Pluto": "Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous." He said in conversation at the 2001 clambake: "If I hadn't learned how to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times." *** #Quote by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#34. Traditional marketing is not focused on creating new categories. Traditional marketing is focused on creating new customers. Traditional marketing involves finding out what consumers want and then giving them what they want, better and cheaper than the competition. #Quote by Al Ries

#35. Futurist Faith Popcorn goes even further. By the year 2010, she predicts, 90 percent of all consumer products will be home-delivered. "They'll put a refrigerator in your garage and bar code your kitchen. Every week they'll restock your favorites, without your ever having to reorder. They'll even pick up your dry cleaning, return your videotapes, whatever you need. #Quote by Al Ries

#36. The mind, as a defense against the volume of today's communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience. #Quote by Al Ries

#37. Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness

He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods,
the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will
not hear his voice all day. He remembers what
the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping.
The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking
about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense
of what is not. The January silence is the sound
of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding,
or the scraping calls of a single blue jay.
Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute.
Many days in the woods he wonders what it is
that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand
in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure,
but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married
into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange
mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit.
He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying.
For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop
as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning
coldness of her head when he kissed her just after.
There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness.
It is, he decides, a quality without definition.
How strange to discover that one lives with the heart
as one lives with a wife. Even after many years,
nobody knows what she is like. The heart has
a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes,
is ambitiously unfaithful. #Quote by Jack Gilbert