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Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

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8<br />

DEFINING AND MANAGING THE<br />

CATEGORY OR SUBCATEGORY<br />

Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not<br />

by solving problems.<br />

— Peter Drucker<br />

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.<br />

— Alan Kay<br />

Creating a new category or subcategory is a path to generating<br />

a winning brand relevance position in which competitors<br />

fail to qualify or are marginalized. The key to the strategy is to<br />

infl uence the defi nition and positioning of the category or subcategory<br />

and to actively manage it over time perhaps having<br />

it evolve based on an ongoing innovation stream and marketing<br />

effort. If that can be done successfully, there will be a better<br />

chance that competitors will be excluded not only in the short<br />

term but also over time. Saleforce.com and Seibel are excellent<br />

examples of innovative fi rms that have created a sharp, distinct<br />

positioning of their categories with clear descriptive labels<br />

(analogous to brands) and then managed the category perceptions<br />

over an extended time period. In doing so, they put potential<br />

competitors at an extreme disadvantage.<br />

Salesforce.com<br />

Marc Benioff, an Oracle alum who created salesforce.com in<br />

1999, is credited with launching and leading a whole new software<br />

category that is called software as a service (SaaS), often<br />

227

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