Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

WINNING THE BRAND RELEVANCE BATTLE 25
that the percentage of major innovations in development
portfolios dropped from 20.2 to 11.5 from 1990 to 2004. And
from the mid - 1990s to 2004 the percentage of total sales attributed
to transformational innovation fell from 32.6 to 28.0 in
2004. There is a bias toward incremental, “ little i ” innovations.
It is caused in part by the fact that incremental innovations for
the existing core businesses tend to have the support of executives
who are generating the bulk of the fi rm sales and profi ts,
and in part because the payoff seems more certain and quantifi
able. More on this bias and how it can be neutralized in
Chapter Eleven .
Levels of Relevance
A brand is not necessarily relevant or irrelevant. In some cases,
there will be a spectrum of relevance. The fuzziness or uncertainty
can occur because the new category or subcategory is not
yet the clear best choice for a customer. There may be a probability
that it will be selected but one that is not near either
certainty or zero probability.
Relevance fuzziness can also occur because of uncertainty
as to whether a brand has visibility and credibility in the new
space. Some brands will be coded by customers as being in the
consideration set of a category or subcategory with confi dence
all the time. Others will never make the cut, and they are irrelevant.
However, there will be others that may be relevant some
of the time. In any case a fuzzy boundary can exist that separates
the relevant brands from the irrelevant.
The uncertainty as to which brands are relevant will depend
on the clarity of the defi nition of the category or subcategory. If
the defi nition has some uncertainty, ambiguity, or fuzziness, the
composition of the set of relevant brands may change depending
on circumstances, the application, the brand ’ s availability and
price, the competitor price, and so on. Nothing is simple.