The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding summary

There are thousands of advertising agencies across the United States. Ask someone who works in one of them what they do and they’ll likely tell you that they’re in the business of brand building. But there’s a common confusion among marketers on this point. Advertising can be effective in maintaining a brand’s visibility in the marketplace, but it’s not an effective way of building a brand.

How do you build brands then?

Powerful brands have a knack of making their names interchangeable with a single positive concept. That’s why most people will say “prestige” when you ask them what word comes to mind when they think of Mercedes-Benz.

Any branding strategy worth its salt aims to achieve the same effect. That’s the sixth law of branding – the Law of the Word.

Imagine you’re peckish and you decide to grab a bite to eat in town. You’re in an unfamiliar neighborhood and walk past two restaurants. One of them is empty, the other heaving. Where are you most likely to wind up eating? Unless you’re short on time, you’ll gravitate toward the busier restaurant.

That’s an example of credentials at work.

Brands love tinkering with their product lines and embellishing tried and tested themes. In grocery stores, line extensions account for some 90 percent of all products. A good example is Hellman’s. The company has complemented its classic mayonnaise with newer variations like light, low fat and even avocado-oil mayonnaises.

But the returns on this strategy are far from clear. Research consistently shows that a good quarter of all products don’t make it off the supermarket shelf for at least a month.

We’ve seen that line expansion is a counterproductive strategy. So what do you do if you want to expand your company? One route many brands have taken is to launch subbrands.

That gets us to law 13 – the Law of Subbrands.

The simplicity of a well-designed logo is deceptive. Creating a clean and memorable logo that sets a brand apart from its competitors is a true craft.

So how do you design a great logo?

What’s in a name? In branding, everything! Choosing a name is one of the most important decisions a company will ever make. How people perceive your brand will be decisively shaped by what you decide to call it. This is law 18, the Law of the Name.

But what defines a good brand name? To be effective, a name must be short and unique.

We’ve seen how important narrowing your brand’s focus and maintaining its consistency is. But what happens when you have to make a change?

Let’s take a look at the twenty-first law, the Law of Change, to see when this risky move might make sense.