In the older books his basic message was very simple (niche and be the first in the mind of the buyer, position).
Ries and Trout are credited with popularizing this positioning subject.
From this very simple message, they wrote books that endlessly repeated this important, but very simple, message. Thus, his previous books were tedious, and sometimes boring. I had the same problem with Andy Grove's book, with his basic theme of "Only the Paranoid Survive": one concept... many pages.
Thus, I thought his previous books were over kill. But this book is different. Maybe because Ries's daughter kept him on track.
This is one of the best books on branding that I've read so far. And, it really does a great job on discussing branding as it applies to internet sites.
For example, don't even think of naming your web site without reading this book. From reading this book, I have a much better understanding of how to structure my web site, how to name it, how to come up with internet site business ideas.
Although Ries is a marketing guru, and not an internet techno-weenie, his understanding of the internet runs deep, from a business point of view.
This is a masterful book, and I recommend it highly. I think a lot of VC firms should have read it before they invested in many of the copy-cat web sites that took their money.
Unlike a lot of the e-babble floating around out there, this book takes a definite stand, and does not hide in vague, unfalsifiable assertions about how everything's going to change. Instead, there are predictions and advice: the internet will not replace television. Build a separate web brand.
I disagreed with probably 6 or 7 of the 11 "immutable laws," especially when the authors are discussing the relations among online and offline brands. However, they never failed to make me stop and consider why I believe what I believe about e-branding, which is important in itself. This shouldn't be the only, or perhaps even the first, internet branding book you buy, but it's a good way to question and expand your thinking on the subject.
I'd be curious as to what the authors have to say about the trend towards bigger corporations, through mergers. According to the authors, these big corporation really shouldn't exist, because things diverge, and not converge.
They also make the pompous statement that the purchasers of business.com could have saved $7,499,979 if they had bought the authors' book. The fact that they could claim credit for saying that a brand name shouldn't be generic is preposterous. That is one of the most basic tenet of branding. Of course, the authors does not discuss sex.com, an equally generic name, which has made $40 million in the course of a few years.