Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

DEFINING AND MANAGING THE CATEGORY OR SUBCATEGORY 249
unique goods that are not out of a production line in China.
The site provides not only a market for goods but a community
home, a place where a person can exchange ideas, form go - to -
market teams, announce events, and attend forums. As people
join, the benefi t grows.
Dramatically Lower Price Point
A signifi cant number of new subcategories are those represented
by fi rms that entered the market with markedly lower
prices, prices often made possible by offerings that are simpler
with fewer features, involve reduced quality, or have
been sourced where costs are low. Clayton Christensen, a
noted Harvard strategy researcher, has studied this phenomenon
with his colleagues. 6 One fi nding is that there are two
sources of customers. One source is existing customers who
don ’ t need or want a full - featured, high - quality variant and
welcome the simpler, cheaper version even with compromised
quality. The other is new customers who believed the
other offerings too expensive and consider the new, low - cost
offerings to be justifi able purchases.
There are many examples of fi rms that followed the model
and attracted customers that had been inhibited from buying
because of price. Tata ’ s Nano is a classic example of a brand
offering that reduced costs on all fronts. The single - use camera
provided a new market, just as the Kodak Brownie did a
century earlier. Southwest Airlines started its operation in the
early 1970s by targeting not only customers looking for a value
airline but also people who could be lured from their automobiles,
a segment that was ignored by the established airlines of
the day. Vanguard ’ s low - cost index funds attracted new buyers
into the industry. The clothing retailers Ross and T. J. Maxx
exploited production overages to allow some customer access to
name brand goods they had avoided. The noncustomers, in this
case facing a price barrier, have typically been ignored by the