Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

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UNDERSTANDING BRAND
RELEVANCE
Categorizing, Framing, Consideration,
and Measurement
It is kind of fun to do the impossible.
—Walt Disney
I realized that my competition was paper, not
computers.
—Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the fi rst
personal digital assistant, the PalmPilot
In this chapter we take a deeper look at relevance. Consumer
psychologists and marketing theorists have done extensive work
over the years using clever experimentation and insightful theory
building that are germane to the relevance concept. Tapping
their efforts will provide knowledge of the scientifi c underpinnings
of relevance and add deeper and more textured insight
into the concept and its applications.
The chapter starts with a discussion of categorization. At its
essence relevance involves forming categories and subcategories
and using them to organize brands. The categorization headline
is that a brand should aspire to be an exemplar of the new category
or subcategory. In the second section framing is explored.
Framing research insights provides guidance to those defi ning,
positioning, and communicating new categories or subcategories.
Studied extensively by psychologists, framing suggests that
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