Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

CREATING BARRIERS 293
If a brand lacks a driven passionate following, it needs an
interest, shared activity, or cause that fi ts the brand to form the
locus of a community. Sharpie, a drawing instrument, formed a
community of mostly designers around creativity. One idea was
to have an autograph wall at the backstage of a country music
festival and opening up to the public one afternoon. Columbia,
the outdoor clothing fi rm, uses Meetup, an online social platform
that gets people together offl ine in local gatherings, to
sponsor outdoor and hiking groups. A common cause, further,
can mobilize a community. Dove has a community redefi ning
society ’ s conception of female beauty. Nissan is building a community
around zero emissions vehicles to support the new Leaf
model.
Some clear guidelines around social media are emerging. First,
the proper brand role is to support, nurture, partner, and enable.
Control just does not work. Second, the community needs to be
perceived as intriguing, useful, or an extension of a lifestyle or
interest. It cannot be a thinly disguised brand - building effort.
Third, communities need to be authentic, focused on a real
need like sharing knowledge or a real passion. There has to be
a reason to participate.
Energizing the Brand
To maintain strong barriers it is important to create an energy
leadership position, to make sure that it is competitors who seem
tired. The best way to do that is to have a stream of innovations
that are visible and keep the offering fresh. However, that
is not always possible, and, even when it is, competitors might
also appear to have innovations. In that case it may be time to
fi nd something with energy and connect it to the brand, creating
and nurturing a branded energizer. Routes to creating energy
and visibility will be discussed in Chapter Ten , which introduces
the problem of maintaining relevance.