Numerous companies and organizations are tapping into a new kind of firepower — brand relevance. In a nutshell, brand relevance gauges a customer’s affinity for a given brand. The metric, in turn, enables marketers to calculate the success of that brand. This approach carries with it a very large assumption – a brand’s relevance to a consumer influences purchasing choices.
Marketing guru and UC Berkeley Haas Professor Emeritus David Aaker recently has published a book on this very topic. Aptly titled Brand Relevance, this intriguing work presents the author’s strategy for developing innovative offerings that lead to new categories or subcategories. These categories and subcategories contain unique features that prevent competition from other companies. When successfully implemented, the categories and subcategories reduce competitors to irrelevant non-entities in the minds of customers.
As Dr. Aaker so succinctly put it, “Success is not about winning the brand preference battle but, rather, the brand relevance war.”
Winners of this hard-fought war abound. For example, Zappos.com, the Internet shoe company, created a category rooted in service and personality. Wheaties Fuel entices buyers desiring an athlete-designed cereal. Zipcar launched the car-share category. Whole Foods Market did likewise for organic food. By utilizing offerings that include features and associations that competitors lack, brand relevance is dramatically altering what customers are buying.
As Aaker points out — “In brand preference competition, the goal is incremental innovation: making it better, faster, cheaper. Brand relevance focuses on substantial or transformational innovation, and actively managing the image of new categories and subcategories. It’s a very different challenge.”
If you’d like to learn more about utilizing brand relevance strategies to enhance the marketability of your own product or service, we’ll be delighted to help. You can connect with Bart Young at the Young Company at 949-376-8404 #205 or byoung@youngcompany.com . And be sure to follow us for the latest industry news and tips.
David Aaker understood engagement long before it was a popular buzz word. Rather than telling students what they should know, he would ask them what they know. He would typically open class by randomly selecting a student (sometimes me) their opinion of a case or decision embedded in our required reading. If you hadn’t done your homework – you were toast. If you had studied well, it was a chance to shine and engage with other students in the class at an intellectual level I found worthy of building my career around. Dr. Aaker inspired us to be the best we can be in an engaging environment that was fun and relevant.
