Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

UNDERSTANDING BRAND RELEVANCE 65
subcategory. Have you bought? Will you buy? Are you interested?
The second dimension of relevance will determine what
brands are in the consideration set. If you are going to buy the
category or subcategory, what brands would you consider?
The pages of the Techtel high - tech tracking database illustrate
how relevance - based measurement can yield strategic
insights. During the 1990s, Intel wanted to be associated with
such attributes as fast, powerful, and having industry - standard
processors. Tracking data showed in the late 1990s that the Intel
Inside program had worked well for these criteria but was not
working well for a new criterion, the search for powerful solutions
related to the emerging Internet. Whereas over 55 percent
of respondents found IBM strongly associated with such
terms as e - commerce and e - business , both Intel at 12 percent
and Dell were low by this measure. Thus Intel and Dell had a
problem in that few thought them relevant to an emerging category,
Internet - based applications. Over time Intel attempted
to respond by expanding the Intel Inside brand to be relevant
beyond microprocessors inside computers, and Dell sought to
dial up its high - end server line.
An alternative to the consideration set question that is
sometimes easy to fi t into a survey instrument is to ask prospective
customers unaided recall questions such as, What brands
can you think of that are capable of providing the category or
subcategory offering? This question demands that brands be
salient enough to be recalled without any prompting. Although
the unaided recall result can include brands not in the consideration
set, there is often a close relationship between the two.
And if a brand does not make the unaided recall test, it will
probably not be in the consideration set.
Simple recognition (what brands from this list are associated
with this category or subcategory?) is generally too weak
a measure. In fact, brands with high recognition and low recall
are termed graveyard brands . These are brands that people have
heard of but are so low on the relevance scale that they do not