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The Origin of Brands: Discover the Natural Laws of Product Innovation and Business Survival By Al Ries and Laura Ries New York: HarperCollins, 2005, 295 pages, $24.95
The Origin of Brands applies Charles Darwin's principle of divergence, taken from The Origin of Species (Darwin 1859), to branding. It demonstrates how survival in nature can shed insight into business survival. What do survival in nature and survival in business have in common, you might wonder? In the first few pages, a reader may question whether the metaphor has been stretched too far. (Even the authors admit that comparing branding and biology could appear far-fetched!) Interestingly, this is not the first time marketing has drawn on theories from biology to make sense of its own world. Wroe Alderson (1965) used concepts from biology to explain marketing:
The biologist and the paleontologist were long preoccupied with the mechanism of structural change and the succession of forms in any evolutionary line. The institutionalist in marketing has a similar interest in the changing forms of retailing and wholesaling and other marketing institutions. (P. 18)
The argument proposed in The Origin of Brands is clear. The goal of an organization is divergence. To diverge in branding is to create a new product category and then to become the first brand within that new category. The authors contend that organizations should strive for divergence and avoid convergence in order to ensure, as the title implies, business survival. Coca-Cola, the world's most valuable brand (at the time of publishing, valued at $70 billion), is deemed successful because it created a new category called cola.
At the other extreme of divergence is convergence. Convergence is found when brands are extended into unrelated product categories (e.g., Motorola, which stands...