In 1993, Al Ries and Jack Trout published The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing – a book I first read in a book store coffee shop in Bondi beach Australia in 2018.
The 22nd and final law was the Law of Resources which says that without adequate funding, an idea won't get off the ground. "You'll get further with a mediocre idea and a million dollars," they wrote, "than with a great idea alone."
This was true in 1993. But it’s just not true anymore.
The book was written in a world where there was no way to reach millions of people without spending millions of dollars. If you wanted your product or message in front of eyeballs, you paid for billboards, TV spots, magazine spreads, radio ads and expensive media teams to produce extremely high quality ads with celebrity actors. The gatekeepers were the media companies, and the price of admission was steep.
Then social media happened.
Since 2013-ish you could post a video from your bedroom and have an algorithm distribute it to millions of people around the world – for free. The gatekeepers are gone. The cost to acquire a customer can drop to basically zero if you know what you're doing.
So I'd like to propose the 23rd Immutable Law of Marketing: The Law of Memetic Fit.
Here's what I mean.
Although having money of course does help, the game increasingly isn't about who has the most money but about who has the clearest vision. Who can see the market as it actually exists, understand what people actually want, and communicate a message in a way that makes them care?
If you can do that, and you have a creative touch, and you're able to match the right energy to your product, you don't need a Super Bowl ad or a billboard anymore to drive sales.
Many of you reading this probably are already aware of this.
But the gold is in the nuance & understanding of how to apply the law in a changing social media landscape.
You can't merely be outrageous for the sake of going viral. If the message is too chaotic, you might get attention but destroy trust in the brand. But if the message is too safe, polished, or boring – nobody cares about it and it dies in the algo.
The packaging of the information needs to be provocative enough to spread, but coherent enough to build trust.
That balance is what I call “memetic product-market fit.”
mPMF is found where the alignment between what your product actually is, what a market segment wants, and what the culture is actually ready to receive – all wrapped into a format that a social media algorithm will distribute.
Obviously, the best version of this is when virality is built into the product itself – like what my friend Hunter has done with NGL and Bags, or what Zach Pogrob is doing with his aura running app where the product is meme.
But even if you're just marketing, the principle holds. If the message is aligned – truly aligned – with the product, the audience, and the cultural moment, you don't need money and the algorithm does the work of distributing it to the people it knows will like it.
At the end of the day, I keep coming back to the same truism:
The greatest marketing is just good art.
-Arlin
