Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

3
CHANGING THE RETAIL
LANDSCAPE
I don ’ t know the key to success, but the key to
failure is trying to please everybody.
—Bill Cosby
If there is no differentiation, there is no innovation.
—A. G. Lafl ey, former P & G CEO
The next three chapters will describe a set of twenty case studies
of brands that attempted to develop new categories or subcategories
in three industries, some not so successfully. These cases
provide a good perspective of the challenges and the complexities
of the task plus the huge upside of a successful effort.
Collectively, the goal is to gain insight into where ideas come
from, the role of trend interpretation and projection, how categories
or subcategories are defi ned, how fi rms achieved success or
why an idea faltered or failed, why competitors fail to respond,
and how barriers to competitors are built.
The three industries provide very different contexts and
efforts. In particular, Chapter Four (the automobile industry)
provides insights on competitor response and how it is intertwined
with each competitor’s own overall business strategy.
Chapter Five (the food industry) provides a look at the complexities
and dynamics of a megatrend, namely healthy eating,
which should be instructive to any fi rm trying to interpret and
maybe infl uence a trend in the marketplace. In this retailing
chapter, we see up close the power of culture and values and
how categories and subcategories are defi ned.
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