The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

Some of my favorites:

The Law of Expansion: The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope. Brands that spread themselves across categories lose brand focus, identity, and ultimately market share. Look at the career pages of company websites - sure sounds as if many are trying to be everything to everyone.

The Law of Publicity: The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising. Can we say Vista?

The Law of the Word: A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer. 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. Kleenex owns "tissue"; who owns recruiting excellence (yes, it's two words but it's Sunday and I can't think of anything else.

The Law of the Category: A leading brand should promote the category, not the brand. Customers don't really care about new brands, they care about new categories. What was the market for cheap cars before Volkswagen? What was the market for home pizza delivery before Dominos? What was the market for in-line skates before Rollerblade? What was job board before Monster? Sure but are they really doing a great job of promoting the brand and indirectly, recruiting?

The Law of Shape: A brand's logotype should be designed to fit the eyes. Both eyes. A customer sees the world through two horizontal-ly mounted eyes peering out of the head. For maximum visual impact, a logotype should have a horizontal shape. The ideal shape is 2 1 /4 units wide by 1 unit high. Huh - learn something new every day...

The Law of Color: A brand should use a color that is the opposite of its major competitor. Coke is red, and Pepsi is Blue. Hertz is yellow, and Avis is Red. Color consistency over the long term can help a brand burn its way into the mind. Double Huh.

The Law of Consistency: A brand is not built overnight. Success is measured in decades, not years.This is the law which is violated most frequently. This may sound crass but there are quite a few upstarts selling themselves as Internet Sourcing experts yet it's still Shally who is King; he and a few others did most of the legwork and experimentation (as Shally says, out of laziness) and the new whipper-snappers are pretty much copying the techniques openly shared by him. As far as training, it's still AIRS and Queen Stoker. There's quite of bit of chest puffing in the Recruiting Net-O-Sphere by the upstarts and frankly I don't believe the product is of the same quality. Okay, off the soap box.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding