Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

254 BRAND RELEVANCE
landfi lls each year. Brita has sponsored the FilterForGood.com
Web site, which discusses the cost to society of disposable bottles
and the advantages of fi ltered water.
Customer - Brand Relationship — Beyond
the Offering
The preceding routes to defi ning a category or subcategory all
involve the functional benefi ts of an offering in some way. That
is a familiar and logical approach. However, the brand and the
category or subcategory it drives can also be defi ned in whole
or in part by aspects of the brand - customer relationship that
go beyond the offering itself. These include common interests,
personality, shared passion, organizational associations, energy,
and corporate social programs. None of these affect the offering,
but they do affect the relationship between the customer
and the brand and are much harder to duplicate than the functional
benefi ts an offering delivers. Competitors can become
irrelevant because they lack these elements and, as a result, may
fail to appear to share the customer ’ s values, to be interested in
customers, to be innovative, or even in delivering high quality.
Shared Interests
An offering can be embedded in a larger activity or goal that is
more meaningful to customers than the offering itself. If a brand
can demonstrate that it is also interested and involved in that
activity or goal, then this common interest can form the basis of
a relationship and can change what people buy. Customers could
decide to buy from brands and firms that demonstrate a common
interest and exclude those that do not. A rationale could be
that a brand sharing a common interest will create and deliver
better offerings because they have better knowledge and care
more but there is also the factor that people like others with
shared interests.