Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

10
GAINING AND MAINTAINING
RELEVANCE IN THE FACE OF
MARKET DYNAMICS
If you are on the right track, you ’ ll get run over if
you just sit there.
—Will Rodgers
There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot
at without result.
—Winston Churchill
In the face of market dynamics, fi rms run the risk of losing
rele vance as the category or subcategory or which they are
focused fades or gets redefi ned and, as a result, the fi rms ’ brand
becomes relevant to a shrinking number of customers. There are
many forces that drive this threat as this chapter will describe,
but one is a growing reluctance to buy from a fi rm that is considered
unacceptable in terms of its values or the way it uses its
market power. Changing such a reputation is diffi cult for both
internal and external reasons. But Walmart, in one of the most
impressive brand stories of the decade, did just that. The case
shows both why and how it was done.
A fi rm that is attempting to become relevant by overcoming
customers’ reasons not to buy their brand faces the same challenges
as a fi rm addressing threats to the relevance they have
already achieved. Hyundai is an example of a brand that needed
to overcome four relevance challenges — quality, styling, foreignmade
products, and not being premium — in order to obtain
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