Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

26 BRAND RELEVANCE
The New Brand Challenge
Creating a new product category or subcategory requires a new
brand and marketing perspective. It is not enough to manage
the brand; it is necessary also to manage the perception of the
category or subcategory and to infl uence what category or subcategory
people will buy as opposed to what brand they prefer.
Asahi was able to fi ght off a much bigger and more resourced
competitor precisely because they managed the dry beer subcategory
brand from the outset while simultaneously growing its
sales. And in the mid - 1990s they repositioned the subcategory
to regain a healthy market share growth rate.
Defi ning and managing the category or subcategory are new
and foreign to brand and marketing strategists. The familiar
challenge, in addition to differentiating the brand from competitors,
is to position a brand as being relevant to an existing
category or subcategory. IBM is in the service business, for
example, or HP makes routers. However, when the challenge is
to defi ne and manage the category or subcategory and differentiate
it from other categories or subcategories, the task is much
different. The focus is not on alternative brands but alternative
categories or subcategories, which is qualitatively different. The
task is to build the category or subcategory even though a competitor
could become relevant and benefi t.
A category or subcategory is not a brand. A brand has a
name refl ecting an organization that stands behind the offering.
Although a category or subcategory sometimes has a name, such
as dry beer or happoshu, it often does not and has to rely on
a description instead. More important, a brand has an organization
behind it, whereas a category or subcategory in general
does not. The exception is when the category or subcategory is
represented by a single brand and its organization.
Nevertheless, a category or subcategory shares some similarities
with a brand. It is defi ned by a set of rich associations
that need to be prioritized and managed. It is the object of
choice decisions. People can have varying degrees of loyalty to it.