Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

154 BRAND RELEVANCE
and subcategories. The fi rst, fi nding the concept, is discussed
in the next chapter.
Key Takeaways
• Trends can be complex and ambiguous, and, worse, their
directions and intensity can change quickly, driven by forces
outside the control of a brand. Detecting, monitoring, and
understanding such trends is challenging, as is any effort to
drive them.
• Such influencers as gurus and such objective arbiters as the
government matter. However, gurus can be trumped by other
gurus and by other credible sources of information. Further,
the government can lack certainty and timeliness and is
subject to political pressures unrelated to the issues at hand.
• A strong brand or subbrand that can represent an innovation
is necessary for success. An established master brand
such as Healthy Choice, Cheerios, or Dreyers or strong
endorser brand such as Betty Crocker will provide credibility,
familiarity, and useful associations. Creating a new
brand from zero such as Fiber One and Nature Valley did
can be expensive, time consuming, and diffi cult but may be
necessary and, if successful, can itself be a platform for future
extensions.
• Having a portfolio of brands, as do General Mills, ConAgra,
and Nabisco, may provide fl exibility because their portfolio
brands can become candidates for powering new offerings. It
is hard to know for sure where the market is going. Having
brand options is one route to winning in dynamic markets.
• A variety of offerings, as we saw in the case of Dreyer ’ s fl avor
selection and the Healthy Choice line, can provide important
barriers to entry because more offerings provide
more links to customers, more innovation and energy,
and more brand exposure and enhancement.