One of the biggest problems in scientific communication is that, often, people don't know what "scientific" actually means. On one side, the "hard science purists" believe that only mathematics, chemistry, physics, and related disciplines can be considered "Science," since they allow hypotheses to be isolated and tested precisely. And this cannot be done with "soft" disciplines like the humanities (such as marketing). On the other side, many speak of science while confusing it with personal anecdotes -- occurrences that have happened multiple times. That's why homeopathy, tarot, the paleo diet, coffee ground reading, and astrology exist. Anecdotes and personal coincidences.
Without getting into academic disputes, we can accept that soft sciences like the humanities and marketing can be considered scientific as long as they are capable of developing universal rules that emerge from observations across different contexts and industries and are then verified through reviews and meta-reviews. That is, by other researchers and in other contexts.
If, for example, numerous independent studies confirm that placing sugar and salt near the checkout counter in supermarkets increases sales when all other factors are equal, we have an empirical law of marketing. That is science.
And science is at the foundation of the work at Deep Marketing.
In this sense, the famous "22 Immutable Laws" by Al Ries, so beloved by many marketing trainers (who often have never actually practiced marketing before teaching it...) are a disaster. Science is distant. Very, very distant.
It's no coincidence that, applying these laws, the iPhone should have been a flop (a prediction error by Al Ries himself), and so should the Lamborghini Urus SUV (an error by one of his Italian fans). We both know how things actually turned out. Such catastrophic predictions, on their own, should call into question the validity of certain theories!
The Lack of Science
Let's look at some examples of the limitations of Al Ries' thought leadership and this particular book, which for some is a Bible to be taken uncritically. Better not.
Is Being First Better?
The author argues that it is "better to be first in the market than to be the best". In professional marketing, this concept is very well known and studied, and it's called "first mover advantage" or "pioneer advantage." The problem is that the simplification by Ries and Trout unfortunately clashes with decades of market evidence. These make first mover advantage something rare, and decidedly not the norm.
Google indeed dethroned Altavista (the first to enter the market), and new, better players continuously steal market share from incumbents. First mover advantage sometimes exists, but it is not indestructible. And, above all, being first means risking much more than others and spending much more than others. Because you have to create the market, and the market might not exist. It's never certain how customers will respond to a new category. Or if they even exist.
SMEs should definitely not follow this advice -- they cannot afford such a high level of failure risk!
A Fallacious Reasoning
Often in the book (and also regarding pioneer advantages), Ries and Trout naively commit a grave logical error: survivorship bias. If, for example, 1,000 companies apply their laws and only 10 succeed, the authors forget about the 990 and take only the 10 winners. Proclaiming that, since these succeeded by applying their laws, so can everyone.
Unfortunately, science is more complicated than that. It's not enough to cherry-pick only what suits us. To derive laws, it is necessary to always account for the entire sample. Literally, Ries should have shown us that, over decades of analyzed data, his laws apply in the majority of cases. Unfortunately, the entire book does the opposite: it selects only the cases that confirm his theses.
If this sounds like a common method, you're right. The typical marketing "guru" does the same: out of thousands of students, they always and only talk about the very few who succeeded thanks to them. Too bad the others failed or are barely "staying afloat," applying the exact same rules.
First in the Mind
"Better to be first in the mind than in the market," another famous rule by Trout and Ries.
Here we go again. Like all bad science, this idea works only because it is vague and everyone fills it in as they please. Exactly like horoscopes: they're so generic they apply to everyone. And, most importantly, this formula contradicts the law "better to be first in the market." Another problem often found in Al Ries' writings: an incredible confusion and contradiction, not understood by the author himself.
We don't get it: is it better to be first in the market or in the mind? Because first I'm told to be a pioneer and then that it doesn't really matter because, in the end, it's only people's perception that makes the difference?
Incidentally, the (real) law of Double Jeopardy in marketing tells us that there is often an incredible conformity between market share and "share of mind." So Al Ries, by distinguishing these two variables (market and memory), introduces a useless and murky discrimination, falsified by science, that increases the level of opinion-based reasoning.
Al Ries' law of focus ("own a word in the customer's mind") is wrong from top to bottom. We know this because there is a science -- cognitive psychology -- that assures us that brand memorization is largely subcognitive and sub-functional. That is, people don't remember brands through conscious or sophisticated reasoning, let alone associate them with specific "words". Brands are remembered like everything else in the brain: in a distributed, multisensory neural network built on brand assets and operating unconsciously.
It's no coincidence that Ries always uses the same examples to justify this law, which, by the way, don't work outside the USA (none of us remember BMW for a single word "drive" -- we remember it through a cloud of unconscious associations).
Be Different from Everyone and Exclusive
The error on Focus invalidates many other laws by the pair of authors, such as that of "exclusivity," according to which every brand should be completely different from others and have specific words not shared with other brands. Alas, we are facing a catastrophic error. This idea clashes with every single concept of professional marketing, neuromarketing, cognitive psychology, and market research. It is so wrong and nonsensical that one wonders how anyone can still believe in it.
The human brain works in exactly the opposite way from how the exclusivity law describes it. In fact, different companies continuously hold similar representations in the customer's mind. In real, good marketing, differentiation must be done across the full range of brand assets, not just "finding the word" or being polar opposites of competitors. Among other things, applying this law risks breaking one of the (real) laws of marketing: that of prototypicality.
A disaster.
Leader and Competitor?
We have no proof that markets always reduce to a leader and a main competitor, as Ries suggests. This idea is like a drop of homeopathic remedy. What is often observed in the real world is a dramatically different dynamic. The most efficient markets appear to have a structure with several leaders concentrated on revenue, few brands in the middle, and very many small brands obsessed with margins and penetration.
Don't Extend!
Another senseless oversimplification is the one against line extensions. A great way to lose a boatload of money. Lines do get extended all the time, continuously, and successfully. You simply need to know how to do it. It takes decades of strategic expertise.
If the world were as simple as Ries suggests, reducible to a few axioms, anyone could do marketing. Thankfully, outside of some colorful theories, entrepreneurs know it's a difficult profession for professionals.
Time Travel
"You can't predict the future." This one rule by Ries alone should be enough to place the book on the joke shelf. The author, after listing a slew of laws that predict the future based on marketing actions taken by companies, claims the future is unpredictable. How is it possible that he didn't notice such a logical conflict that entirely invalidates his work?
And it's false: a certain degree of stable correlation is the foundation of science. The difference between good and bad science is precisely that the former has predictive ability, at least at the level of stable and strong correlations.
It would be unfair not to close this deep dive with the merits of Ries and Trout. Merits that are, unfortunately, not understood by the trainers who teach them. Al Ries' book deserves a place in marketing, if only because:
- It clarified that the discipline is both economic and human. It has to do with the human mind and its structure. This is not a trivial consideration. The book fought against a prevailing economic reductionism. Too bad it responded with a different reductionism. And too bad it didn't scratch the love for revenue-before-people-and-competitive-advantage held by many Al Ries fans. He had great intuitions but failed to bring them to fruition.
- It insists on the concepts of "candor" and "embracing failure". Frankly, this alone makes it worth reading. Too bad the honesty demanded by Al Ries -- not hiding one's failures but rather embracing the falsification of one's ideas and criticism -- is taboo in the communities that spread his gospel.
- Al Ries reminds us that success and arrogance go hand in hand, so we must be very careful. Absolutely true.
- With an incredible intellectual acumen that starkly contrasts with some argumentative weaknesses in the rest of the book and the use of gimmicks and anecdotes, Trout and Ries note that, often, in marketing, the majority of effects come from a single "bold" and fortunate move. True. This is predicted by the laws of Complexity and Chaos and has to do with reality's positive feedback dynamics. The problem is that we only know which move worked after the fact, not before. So this law, while brilliant, is perfectly useless, except to sensitize companies. Which is impossible because in the real world we are bombarded with data and information and can hardly isolate things as they happen. We only see "in hindsight."