Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

252 BRAND RELEVANCE
new generation with its addition of a fourth color, yellow, to
a technology that had heretofore relied on three colors. The
technology, branded as Quadpixel and placed in Sharp ’ s Aquos
Quantron TVs, displays more than a trillion colors, many more
than in current models. Because the Sharp advance was easier
to communicate with the fourth color and a strong set of technology
brands, namely Quadpixel and Aquos, it was more feasible
for it to position its product as new generation than it was
for Samsung with its weaker Luxia brand and its complex story.
The challenge is to create the perception of a new generation
rather than of an incremental improvement — the difference
between gaining a brand preference edge and creating a new
subcategory.
The smart or lucky brands create a series of offering generations.
Intel during the 1980s and 1990s had a new generation
out about every three or four years. The challenge for Intel was
determining how to brand the new technology. There turned
out to be degrees of newness. Those offerings that were clearly
breakthroughs with corresponding impact would get their own
names. So there were the 86 Series, Pentium, Celeron, Xeon,
and Itanium. Others were labeled as variants, such as Pentium
DX, Pentium 4F, and Pentium Extreme.
A New Application or Activity
The creation of an activity - based category or subcategory can
expand the market and provide credibility and relevance for the
driving brand. In addition an application or activity can often
enhance customer involvement and confer self - expressive and
emotional benefi ts. Competitor brands that are not relevant to
the application or activity may not make the consideration set.
Consider the following cases in which a subcategory was
defi ned by an application or activity. Crayola has fi ne - quality
crayons and other drawing instruments for children. However,
it reframed the value proposition of its brand and its target