Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

DEFINING AND MANAGING THE CATEGORY OR SUBCATEGORY 253
category to be about colorful fun and creativity in the lives of
children, providing vehicles for visual expression. Very different
from an art category. Orville Redenbacher attempted to
make microwave popcorn part of bringing a theater experience
to watching movies at home. Lindsay Olives attempted
to change its category from olives to a social experience that
is more fun, fl avorful, and interesting with olives than with
alternatives like carrots and celery. Bayer helped defi ne a new
subcategory baby aspirin taken regularly to ward off heart
attacks — with its Bayer 81 mg — and tap into the emotion
around avoiding heart attacks.
An Expanded Competitive Space
A fi rm can sometimes expand the scope of the category or subcategory
to include noncustomers who would value their offering
and include competitors that would be in a severe disadvantage.
Recall the classic case of Southwest Airlines who created a new
category when they started service between Houston, Dallas,
and San Antonio and proclaimed that it was competing with
cars, which introduced totally new dimensions in the category
such as travel time and effort. recall also the case of DiGiorno
frozen pizza, discussed in Chapter Two , which framed the competitive
space to include delivered pizza. With a tagline “ It ’ s not
delivery, it ’ s DiGiorno, ” the brand went from having a modest
price disadvantage to a huge price advantage.
The Clorox brand Brita is a water - fi ltering product with
a limited customer base of those who want better tap water.
However, it has expanded its category to include those who
buy and use bottled water and contribute to enormous energy
usage and disposal problems. The concept is to use a Brita fi lter
and a reusable container instead of bottled water. The customer
will not only save signifi cant money but also, more important, will
have a positive effect on the environment. Brita users will not
contribute to the some thirty - eight billion bottles that end up in