Ries vs Davies: Brands as Physics

Al Ries is the father of Positioning, is the Isaac Newton of marketing. He likes to write books that employ the phrase “immutable laws” in them. Marketing and branding can be understood like clockwork. The universe of brand and consumer relationship can be broken down into discrete laws and relationships between the consumer and brand. Identify a unique position for your brand in the market place. Give your brand a good name, a good logo, and a good slogan that reflects this positioning. Then bombard the consumer with 30 second ads that reinforce this positioning ad nauseum. Lather, rinse repeat.

Note how Ries went from “22 laws” for branding and marketing, and down to merely 11 laws for the “11 Laws of Internet Branding” published in 2000. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the Internet is pretty mutable.

Then we have Russell Davies, the father of Interestingness. He’s like the first quantum account planner. His philosophy questions Ries insistence on focus when we have an increasingly fragmented yet simultaneously networked world. Writing in the more ambiguous format of the blogosphere – and rejecting words like ‘laws’ in favor of words like “maybe” and “perhaps” – Davies posits that strong brands are first and foremost interesting. They ‘do stuff’ and don’t succumb to the tyranny of the Big Idea. When ‘engagement’ is the watchword of the day, perhaps we communication needs to be complex for us to be considered worth thinking about.

More on complexity to come.