The Law of Sacrifice —If you try to be everything to everyone, you will just be noise. If you can be something very helpful to someone very specific, you can be targeted, precise, and own a space in the mind. Think about SONY as a brand. What is a SONY? Does one specific item spring to mind, or could it be a number of items, from radios to televisions. Compare that to Kindle as a brand. What is a Kindle? Simple. It’s an eReader. Sony was the first company to market an eReader, so why does Kindle dominate and Nook come second? When it comes to an item that they introduced, Sony is now an afterthought and recently transferred their eReader store to Kobo. Clearly they failed, lost in the noise.

These are the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing1, and as the title warns, “Violate Them At Your Own Risk.”

The Law of Leadership	The Law of Line Extension
The Law of the Category	The Law of Sacrifice
The Law of the Mind	The Law of Attributes
The Law of Perception	The Law of Candor
The Law of Focus	The Law of Singularity
The Law of Exclusivity	The Law of Unpredictability
The Law of the Ladder	The Law of Success
The Law of Duality	The Law of Failure
The Law of the Opposite	The Law of Hype
The Law of Division	The Law of Acceleration
The Law of Perspective	The Law of Resources Warning

Startups and early stage businesses that are desperate for business will do anything for anyone who will pay them money. Often this work delays or prevents them from becoming successful, as they seek more and more of this work, instead of building and developing their core competency.

Warriors have specialties. There are scouts, snipers, cavalry, archers, and so forth. That specialty does not diminish their value. It enhances it, as a precision munition is far more useful than an unguided bomb or a handful of fire crackers. It is preferable, and even essential, that you sacrifice skills in certain areas in order to focus on the core skills and abilities that are relevant to your particular battle. This is the law of sacrifice. The less you can do, the more you are worth—when you can do that one thing at a world class level! So it is written.