Books by Al Ries

The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding is the definitive text for businesses eager to jump on the Internet expressway.

In the book you'll learn why:

The Internet can be a business or a medium for your brand, but not both.

Interactivity is the single most important ingredient of any Internet site.

The kiss of death for an Internet brand is a common name.

Being second in a category is tantamount to being nowhere.

You have to be fast. You have to be first. You have to be focused.

Everyone is talking about convergence while just the opposite is happening.

The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding will also give you tangible information on how to successfully build your company, product, service, or self into a hot and profitable brand on the Internet. Specifically you'll learn how to:

Build a brand that will dominate a category over an extended period of time.

Find a proper name (instead of a common one) for your Web site.

Take your brand into the global marketplace.

Avoid the biggest mistake in Internet branding: the belief that you can do everything.

Take advantage of the transformations that will occur in all aspects of life, thanks to the power of the Internet.

With characteristic counterculture observations and signature marketing savvy, Ries and Ries bring their expertise to branding on the Internet, the most challenging problem in the world of marketing today. No one who wants to turn a brand into a global phenomenon should ignore their sage advice.

This marketing classic has been expanded to include new commentary, new illustrations, and a bonus book: The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding

Smart and accessible, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is the definitive text on branding, pairing anecdotes about some of the best brands in the world, like Rolex, Volvo, and Heineken, with the signature savvy of marketing gurus Al and Laura Ries. Combining The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding, this book proclaims that the only way to stand out in today's marketplace is to build your product or service into a brand -- and provides the step-by-step instructions you need to do so.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding also tackles one of the most challenging marketing problems today: branding on the Web. The Rieses divulge the controversial and counterintuitive strategies and secrets that both small and large companies have used to establish internet brands. The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is the essential primer on building a category-dominating, world-class brand.

Branding. Dubbed by many the "marketing buzzword" of the late '90s, everyone knows that building your product or service into a bona fide brand is the only way to cut through the clutter in today's insanely crowded marketplace.

The only question is, how do you do it?

Learn the laws of branding in the branding bible: The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. Brilliant, bold, and mercifully brief, this is the definitive work on branding, distilling the complex principles and theories espoused in other long-winded, high-priced professional marketing tomes into 22 quick and easy-to-listen-to vignettes. Pairing the brand-blazing strategies from the world's best, like Coca-Cola, Xerox, and Starbucks, with the world-renowned marketing savvy of best-selling author Al Ries and his daughter Laura Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding builds on the huge international success of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and provides the expert insight you seek on business's hottest topic in less time than an airplane ride.

Find out:

Why you will fail to create a brand through advertising, sales promotion, public relations or fancy packaging.

How to define your category...even if you're not first to market.

How overbranding equals underwhelming.

Why good old-fashioned publicity may be the missing link in the brand-building process.

Why giving your brand the right name is perhaps more important than the brand itself.

And perhaps most important of all:

How to own a word in the mind of the consumer.

Smart and accessible, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding provides the ammo you need to dominate your category and turn your product or service into a world-class brand.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing can mean the difference between success or failure for your product or company. Calling upon over 40 years of marketing experience, authors Al Ries and Jack Trout use vivid examples and fascinating anecdotes to explain the keys to today's tough, competitive marketplace. Learn how to avoid the danger of ego and arrogance, the need to understand trends, and many other crucial marketing lessons, as Ries and Trout point you solidly in the direction of success. With sparkling clarity and brilliant insight, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing shows how to play by the rules and become a winner in your field.

The authors have distilled their 40-plus years of marketing expertise to provide the key to today's competitive marketplace, showing you what makes some products inordinately successful while others fall by the wayside.

Offers revised thinking on management practice, emphasizing tactics, rather than arbitrary decision making, to guide strategy, and containing a step-by-step procedure for a marketing campaign.

Bestselling authors and world-renowned marketing strategists Al and Laura Ries usher in the new era of public relations.

Today's major brands are born with publicity, not advertising. A closer look at the history of the most successful modern brands shows this to be true. In fact, an astonishing number of brands, including Palm, Starbucks, the Body Shop, Wal-Mart, Red Bull and Zara have been built with virtually no advertising.

Using in-depth case histories of successful PR campaigns coupled with those of unsuccessful advertising campaigns, The Fall of Advertising provides valuable ideas for marketers -- all the while demonstrating why

• advertising lacks credibility, the crucial ingredient in brand building, and how only PR can supply that credibility;
• the big bang approach advocated by advertising people should be abandoned in favor of a slow build-up by PR;
• advertising should only be used to maintain brands once they have been established through publicity.

Bold and accessible, The Fall of Advertising is bound to turn the world of marketing upside down.

The author guides managers back on track and explains how companies that focus on core products and get rid of extraneous, energy-wasting areas, are the most successful. With examples from a variety of industries, Ries reveals which corporations are focused--such as Volvo and McDonald's--and predicts the kind of corporate thinking that is destined to fail--such as new developments at Kodak that veer off from photography. 'Focus' defines a new standard for corporate competitiveness, explaining how all companies, large or small, can be their best.

If your company has lost the focus it once had, here are clear solutions for moving your organization back to its key service and discarding everything else. Ries, coauthor of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, gives clear examples from a variety of industries and demonstrates how crucial focus can be. Focus, he offers, is the key component to the successes of on-track companies such as Coca-Cola, Volvo, Sun Microsystems, and Little Caesars. He defines a new standard of corporate competitiveness for companies both big and small and passes on his extensive marketing experience and cutting-edge managerial advice. Get focused: your future depends on it.

An updated edition demonstrates how to focus on core products in order to increase market share and evolve a company, making recommendations on how to enable prosperous growth while explaining the consequences of following extraneous ventures.

How do you measure business success? How do you pick future winners? Al Ries and Ted Kinni use four hard criteria (revenue growth, profit growth, growth in market value and growth in globalization) and four soft criteria (marketing innovation, technological innovation, degree of focus and future prospects) to draw out the secrets of success and the lessons other businesses can learn.
FUTURE FOCUS answers three critical questions that everyone involved with business including leaders, managers, financial professionals, investors and employees must ask when planning for the future: What are the essential ingredients of 21st century corporate success? Which companies best exemplify these qualities? How can we learn and profit from their example?

Reveals a shift in marketing trends from advertising to publicity, citing the successes of such top brands as the Body Shop, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart while sharing strategies on establishing credibility and implementing a slow PR build. (Business & Finance)

"A business book with a difference: clear-cut advice, sharp writing and a minimum of jargon."­­Newsweek

An examination of the process of brand building shares case studies for a number of successful products, analyzing marketing methods that demonstrate effective brand divergence, in a guide that argues against current marketing trends. By the authors of The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

What Charles Darwin did for biology,
Al and Laura Ries do for branding.

In their exciting new book, The Origin of Brands, the Rieses take Darwin's revolutionary idea of evolution and apply it to the branding process. What results is a new and strikingly effective strategy for creating innovative products, building a successful brand, and, in turn, achieving business success.Here, the Rieses explain how changing conditions in the marketplace create endless opportunities to build new brands and accumulate riches. But these opportunities cannot be found where most people and most companies look. That is, in the convergence of existing categories like television and the computer, the cellphone and the Internet.

Instead, opportunity lies in the opposite direction -- in divergence. By following Darwin's brilliant deduction that new species arise from divergence of an existing species, the Rieses outline an effective strategy for creating and taking to market an effective brand. In The Origin of Brands, you will learn how to:

• Divide and conquer
• Exploit divergence
• Use the theories of survival of the firstest and survival of the secondest
• Harness the power of pruning

Using insightful studies of failed convergence products and engaging success stories of products that have achieved worldwide success through divergence, the Rieses have written the definitive book on branding. The Origin of Brands will show you in depth how to build a great brand and will lead you to success in the high-stakes world of branding.

"One of the most important communication books I've ever read. I highly recommend it!"
­­Spencer Johnson, author of Who Moved My Cheese? and co-author of The One Minute Manager