Ep. 1352: Laura Ries with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Michael Covel's Trend Following

Michael Covel

Investing, Business

4.6 • 730 Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2025

⏱️ ? minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

My guest today is Laura Ries. Laura is the chairwoman of Ries Positioning Pioneer, and a world-famous positioning consultant. For three decades, she has helped clients to position their brands in the mind of consumers for business growth.

The topic is her book The Strategic Enemy: How to Build and Position a Brand Worth Fighting For.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

Essence and history of positioning
Role of the strategic enemy in branding
Impact of AI on personal branding
Risks and rewards of brand extensions
Case studies of successful and failed brand strategies

Jump in!

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I’m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I’m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show.

To start? I’d like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/

You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/

Can’t get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast

My social media platforms:
Twitter: @covel
Facebook: @trendfollowing
LinkedIn: @covel
Instagram: @mikecovel

Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

Transcript

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0:00.0	My guest today is Laura Reese. She has a book, The Strategic Enemy, How to Build and Position a Brand
0:05.8	Worth Fighting for. Her father, a very well-known guy in the field and history of marketing
0:13.0	and positioning, Al Reese. I have several of his books from back in the day. There will never go
0:19.4	by a day where I don't think about how can I better
0:23.4	present myself? How can I better present my brand? Laura, as you will hear, has lots of thoughts,
0:30.0	lots of insights, and a terrible amount of experience. Without any further delay from me,
0:36.1	let's jump right into my conversation today with Laura Reese
0:39.1	and talk some brands, some positioning, and finding our strategic enemy.
0:44.9	I hope you enjoy.
1:05.7	I'm going. I remember when I first got into business in the 90s, seeing your father's name when it came to marketing.
1:09.2	Because if you were getting into business and you were going to get into marketing, branding,
1:12.1	your last name was everywhere. Really?
1:18.0	You know this, right? I do. Yeah. I'm trying to bring it back. To take it to something very simple, you do this great and just opening up your new book, The Strategic Enemy, but the very
1:24.1	simple idea of positioning. And we might hear this and we might think we know what it means.
1:29.5	But for you, you've got the audience right now.
1:32.2	You're going to bring them into the most basics of basics.
1:35.4	Positioning.
1:36.1	And it actually starts with a rock.
1:37.8	So let me let you bring the audience into this idea of positioning.
1:42.2	It came back to my father was a young guy on Madison Avenue with a very small B-to-B advertising
1:49.1	agency, and he wanted to differentiate himself, actually.
1:53.0	But also he wanted to do the best work for the clients.
	...

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