Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

66 BRAND RELEVANCE
come to mind when considering a product category or subcategory.
Suppose an audience segment were asked to name compact
cars, and later were shown a list of twenty compact brands and
asked to check those that they recognized as makers of compact
cars. If Dodge was recognized by most but few had named Dodge
in the recall task, then Dodge would have high recognition but
low recall.
Being in the graveyard is much worse that being completely
unknown, because it is hard to create news around a graveyard
brand. Because the brand is familiar, audience members assume
that they know enough about the brand and fail to attend to
“ news ” about it. A brand that is unfamiliar, however, has more
potential to be newsworthy.
A common mistake is to use categories or subcategories
associated with the brand as a measure of relevance. Such associations
do provide clues as to the brand ’ s current image and
barriers to changing it. The image of Sony can be understood
better by knowing that it is associated with television sets,
consumer electronics, movies, music, and games. However, the
more strategically important association — and the one that
drives relevance — is what brands customers are associating with
the category or subcategory. If a customer mentions Sony as an
option when considering video cameras, then Sony is relevant
to video cameras regardless of whatever other products the
customer assumes that Sony makes. In fact, a brand that aspires
to be relevant to multiple categories or subcategories may fi nd
that some people may not be able to recall all the categories
to which the brand is relevant when the brand name is the
stimulus. That doesn ’ t really matter, because it is category - or
subcategory - driven brand recall that determines market power.
With the concept of brand relevance now elaborated,
we turn to two dozen or so case studies of brands that have
attempted to fi ght and win the brand relevance battle. Most
have attempted to create new categories or subcategories. The
idea is to create a set of contexts that will illuminate the issues,