Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

WINNING THE BRAND RELEVANCE BATTLE 13
The Brand Relevance Model
The second route to competitive success is to change what people
buy by creating new categories or subcategories that alter
the ways they look at the purchase decision and user experience.
The goal is thus not to simply beat competitors; it is rather to
make them irrelevant by enticing customers to buy a category
or subcategory for which most or all alternative brands are not
considered relevant because they lack context visibility or credibility.
The result can be a market in which there is no competition
at all for an extended time or one in which the competition
is reduced or weakened, the ticket to ongoing fi nancial success.
Defining Relevance
To better understand relevance, consider a simple model of
brand - customer interaction in which brand choice involves four
steps organized into two distinct phases, brand relevance and
brand preference, as shown in Figure 1.3 .
Step One: The person (customer or potential customer) needs
to decide which category or subcategory to buy and use. Too
often a brand is not selected or even considered because the
person fails to select the right category or subcategory rather
than because he or she preferred one brand over another. If a
person decides to buy a minivan rather than a sedan or an SUV,
for example, he or she will exclude a large set of brands that are
not credible in the minivan space .
One challenge is to create the category or subcategory by
conceiving and executing an innovative offering. Another challenge
is to manage the resulting category or subcategory and
to infl uence its visibility, perceptions, and people ’ s loyalty to
it. The goal is to encourage people to think of and select the
category or subcategory.
The fact that the person selects the category or subcategory,
perhaps a compact hybrid, makes the starting place very