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INTRODUCTION
Marketers around the world spend billions of dollars a year in the pursuit of building strong brands. Study after study demonstrates that strong brands create higher amounts of shareholder value, by increasing revenue and margin growth and decreasing the riskiness of a company's cash flows, more effectively than weak brands (see Milward Brown,1 Interbrand2 and Madden et al.3 ). According to some authors of popular management books, building such brands requires the application of simple 'laws' of branding (see, eg Alsop4 and Ries and Ries5 ). These books, however, often claim to be based on practical experience instead of on systematic research. Hence, writers of such books seem to use the word 'laws' for rhetorical, and not scientific reasons.
The value of branding laws--if they were available--is quite evident. For example, they would help practitioners make better branding decisions if they could rely on a set of solid principles and these could then provide fruitful hypotheses for academic research. So are there laws in branding? Are there universal, reliable principles marketers can use in their efforts to influence the choice processes of customers and stakeholders in their own favour by building powerful brands? And if so, what do they look like? This is the central issue this paper aims to address.
The obvious first remark is an argument against such a claim. Social science--to which the study of branding belongs--is not characterised by the presence of rules and principles with the immutability of the laws we find in the exact sciences. Within the field of economics, the most exact of the social sciences, a number of 'laws' exist, such as the law of diminishing returns, the law of supply and demand and the law of one price. Yet, they are law-like regularities more than laws in the classical scientific sense. As Mark Blaug,6 a prominent economic methodologists, states, 'if by a law we mean well-corroborated, universal relations between events deduced from independently tested initial conditions, few modern economists would claim that economics has so far produced more than one or two laws'.
Nevertheless, based on an extensive study of the neurobiological literature, the author believes that it is possible to describe several robust, general findings from the 'hard'...