Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

208 BRAND RELEVANCE
boring. Perhaps more important, the development of a transformational
new offering can become part of the champion ’ s
identity, and success represents personal as well as professional
fulfi llment.
As a result of an intensive need by the champion and the
associated team for an offering to go forward and to succeed,
information is fi ltered. Information that supports the offering
gets through, and that not supporting gets distorted or
minimized — confi rmation bias in action. And hard decisions
get postponed or become less objective than they should be.
It is just the nature of people and organizations. Of course, a
disciplined, objective evaluation process can reduce the risk, but
it will always be there.
As a result, the value proposition may be overestimated or
it might even be something of a mirage. The vision of one - stop
fi nancial service, for example, had much less value to customers
than was hoped when it was fi rst tried in the early 1980s and
again two decades later. Customers wanted competence and outstanding
service from all fi nancial service suppliers and whether
they came from the same organization was relatively unimportant.
Yet, those conceiving of the concept could only see the
on - paper advantages and ignored both the implementation diffi
culties and the lack of customer interest.
The Gloomy Picture Bias
The risks of killing a project with high potential on the basis of
erroneous or false judgments can be much more costly than giving
the green light to one that will fail. The possibility for a large
business platform may be lost by a bad “ no - go ” decision. Further,
executives who spend resources on failures are held accountable,
but incidents in which executives allow opportunities to pass
through their hands are forgotten. For example, although the
unwise expenditures at GM of then - CEO Roger Smith on robotics
and IT were visible, the less - visible decision to kill the electric