Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

WINNING THE BRAND RELEVANCE BATTLE 11
delivery of functional benefi ts, and often these perceptions are
accurate. Why rethink a product and brand decision that has
worked when alternatives are similar? Why go to the trouble to
even locate alternatives? Seeking alternatives is a mental and
behavioral effort with little perceived payoff. Further, people
prefer the familiar, whether in regard to a route to work, music,
people, nonsense words, or brands.
It is inordinately diffi cult to create an innovation that
will signifi cantly alter market momentum. When there is an
enhanced offering that should stimulate switching behavior,
competitors usually respond with such speed and vigor that any
advantage is often short - lived. Further, marketing programs that
upset the market are rare because brilliance is hard to come by
and resources for implementation are scarce.
As a result of the diffi culty of changing customer momentum
and the fact that there are diminishing returns to cost - reduction
programs, preserving margins in the face of capable and well -
funded competitors is challenging. A market with competitors
engaging in brand preference strategies is usually a recipe for
unsatisfactory profi tability.
Such Japanese beer companies as Asahi and also Suntory
and Sapporo pursued brand preference strategies from 1960 to
1986 without making a dent in the Kirin position. The heritage
and appeal of Kirin ’ s lager beer, its loyal buyer base, and the
associated distribution clout made Kirin able to resist all types of
product and marketing initiatives of competitors, aggressive and
clever though they were.
Brand preference strategies, the focus of most fi rms, are particularly
risky in dynamic markets because incremental innovation
will often be made inconsequential by marketplace
dynamics. Bob McDonald, the CEO of P & G, introduced the
acronym VUCA to describe today ’ s world — volatile, uncertain,
complex, and ambiguous. 3 Product categories and subcategories
are no longer stable but rather emerging, fading, and evolving.
Products are proliferating at a faster and faster rate.