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Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

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DEFINING AND MANAGING THE CATEGORY OR SUBCATEGORY 233<br />

1 percent of employees ’ time (actually six days per year) was<br />

made available to social programs and causes. Finally, 1 percent<br />

of the salesforce.com installations were for not - for - profi t organizations<br />

to help them become more effective and effi cient. In<br />

Benioff ’ s view the 1/1/1 program not only does good but also<br />

helps the brand and provides employees with a larger purpose.<br />

What impact does participation in these social programs<br />

have on customers not just for salesforce.com but for any fi rm<br />

that makes social consciousness a part of their values? Some<br />

customers will ignore or be unaware of them. Many others will<br />

regard the fi rm ’ s social consciousness as a positive with the<br />

potential to affect their brand preference decisions. Some others,<br />

however, will include participation in effective social programs<br />

as part of the defi nition of a category and will exclude<br />

brands from consideration that do not have at least a minimal<br />

effort on that dimension. The size and intensity of this group<br />

will determine whether supporting social programs does affect<br />

the very defi nition of the category.<br />

Salesforce.com played an active role in positioning a new<br />

category. In doing so they told the story about cloud computing<br />

and SaaS subscription service as a new generation of software<br />

and how it should be used in enterprise computing. The<br />

new generation was portrayed as the underdog, just as was<br />

the brand, surrounded by an aura of inevitability. In defi ning the<br />

new category, salesforce.com became an exemplar, which tied<br />

its brand to the new way of looking at and using software.<br />

Salesforce.com was more than a category, of course. It was an<br />

organization with values, a suite of applications, and some strong<br />

subbrands as well.<br />

Salesforce.com hit $ 1 billion in its fi rst decade and became<br />

the leader in cloud computing in terms of sales and customers<br />

with over sixty - fi ve thousand customers and over one million<br />

subscribers. Salesforce.com , also a thought leader, made every<br />

effort to stay in the forefront, to be perceived as an industry<br />

leader and the exemplar of cloud computing. They held “ launch

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