The Origin of Brands: Darwin, Advertising, and Google

I just read The Origin of Brands, by the enthusiastic father-daugher duo, Al and Laura Ries. The Origin of Brands takes Darwin's other important idea - regarding the link between special prosperity and species diversity - and applies it to product development and brand proliferation.

I won't go into the flaws of the book. They will be obvious to anyone who reads it. But the central message pierces the bulls-eye for those interested in what separates successful companies from mediocre (or crummy) companies. This is the gist:

1) Go where no man or woman has gone before.
2) Don't compete within existing product categories.
3) Create new categories.
4) Don't worry about market size.
5) The most successful companies created markets (categories) where the market size was zero!

That's it. End of story.

And it's a true story. And as an extension of my bloviations last week about Google and Microsoft, the story carries extra-special resonance. Here is Google, which has created an entirely new - and a phenomenally successful - business by inventing and then populating a new category of online advertising. With its pay-per-click text ads, Google offered a substitute for the appallingly intrusive, annoying, expensive graphical banner ads. It created this advertising category and now it owns this category.

Microsoft (and Yahoo!, for that matter) will never displace Google in the online advertising category. By golly, Google is a now a verb! Is Microsoft a verb? Is Yahoo! a verb? No. Microsoft is an adjective these days, and normally a pejorative one. And Yahoo! is an exclamation point. Or, from a different perspective, a spear to the vitals of the business.

So read The Origin of Brands (which, ironically, given Google's success, spurns advertising itself as a fool's paradise). In many ways, The Origins of Brands is a conventional "new marketing" book, similar to Blue Ocean Strategy and The Purple Cow. Hit the edges of the market, define your market so you have no competitors, don't worry about market size. None of these approaches are for the faint of heart. They embrace risk. They require leaps of faith. It is far more comfortable to do what everyone else is doing, as in "no one ever got fired for buying IBM."

But even for large and successful companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft, you can hear the death rattle of the business when it becomes too obsessed with its competitors. These are not companies that will go away. But AOL has not gone away either. And does anyone care about it anymore. Does anyone think it is remotely relevant as a business?

At Knowledge Mosaic, which is a very tiny company, we also think about these questions on a daily basis. We face the dilemma of being stuck in a market with entrenched competitors, a market that, truth be told, is no longer growing very rapidly (although at our size there is still significant room for us to grow). But we are tired of this little pond. And while we respect and love our competitors, we are tired of them, too.

So we are embarking on our own adventure in the coming weeks and months. An adventure involving taking everything we have learned in the past five years about legal research and legal practice and reconceptualizing both in the creation of a new product platform that will be different from anything ever before seen in the market for legal, regulatory, and compliance news, research, and tools.

More to come.