Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

EPILOGUE 357
react to an opportunity too late. If there is one generalization
from this whole book, it is that timing is crucial. Even being a
bit early or a bit late can be fatal. And it is not easy to be there
and ready at exactly the right time.
Implementation is diffi cult, especially when it involves programs
and capabilities unfamiliar to the organization that then
have to be acquired or learned.
Market acceptance is uncertain. Even the best concepts with
sound logic around demand potential can disappoint. The market
response can be less than expected, or the response can be good
but the market too small.
Even when an offering is successful, the fi rm could have failed
to create barriers, in which case the success will be short - lived
and the advantage in creating the new category or subcategory
will be modest and perhaps too small to justify the investment.
In summary, the effort to develop an offering that will create
a new category or subcategory can be uncertain and risky. If it
should fail, signifi cant investment in resources and time that
could have been spent elsewhere could be wasted. Even worse,
the initiative may have been important enough to distort the
strategic direction of the fi rm.
Because engaging in innovation is uncertain, risky, and
expensive does not mean that a fi rm should not be aggressively
innovative and invest in organizational change to become more
supportive of innovation. The fact is that it is also risky to be a
trend res ponder and an even greater risk to be a trend - unaware
fi rm, one with such tunnel vision that the fi rm does not sense or
chooses to ignore market dynamics.
The message is to be aggressively innovative but with recognition
of the challenges and investment required in both
individual projects and organizational changes. The successful
organization will actively manage the diffi culties and uncertainties
of innovation, which will allow it to seize opportunities to
make competitors irrelevant or less relevant and avoid seeing a
healthy business drift into irrelevance.