Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

244 BRAND RELEVANCE
affordable Target line of sweaters, blouses, pants, skirts, dresses,
shoes, and purses that was well received. The renowned architect
Michael Graves developed for Target a collection of cookware
and other dining products.
From Components to Systems
A classic way to change the market is to move from components
to systems. The idea is to look at the system in which the product
or service is embedded and to expand perceptions horizontally.
The move to a system - driven offering is large, pervasive,
and growing as customers are increasingly demanding a system
solution and one - fi rm accountability. Competitors selling ad hoc
products, even though these might be superior, are increasingly
at a disadvantage or even irrelevant. Sears offers a one - stop
place to deliver home improvement projects. The Kindle book
reader from Amazon is linked into the Amazon infrastructure so
that the ordering and downloading of books is easy and takes
seconds. If the Kindle were on its own it would not be compelling
and would be very vulnerable.
Software firms have regularly combined component programs.
We have already seen how Siebel was the creator of CMR,
the integrated suite of customer - contact programs, and how
salesforce.com started with a suite of programs dedicated to sales -
force management. Microsoft in 1992 combined Word, Excel,
and PowerPoint into an integrated system branded as Office, a
move that dramatically changed what customers bought and
made the major competitors less relevant and ultimately fade.
Fifteen years later Microsoft tailored its Office suite to different
segments when they offered several versions — standard, small
business, professional, and developer — in a move that closed the
door to others who might try to use a niche approach to become
relevant.
KLM Cargo ’ s offering was becoming a low - margin business.
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In response, KLM initiated its Fresh Partners initiative to