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Unless your brand is one of the exceptions, it needs energy. a brand that has insu? cient energy has two potential liabilities. first, it will lack visibility and it will no longer be among those that come to mind when customers consider a purchase. it will be lost in the noise of the environment and will no longer be relevant. Second, and perhaps worse, it can see declines in key image items such as perceived quality and trust. in addition, it could see the degradation of its ability to drive diff erentiation and loyalty.

From Prophet Vice Chairman David Aaker comes Three Threats to Brand Relevance. In it, Aaker reveals that the key to an organization’s sustained growth is to learn what it takes to bring “big” innovation to market and create barriers to competitors. Building on his full-length book Brand Relevance, Aaker offers a guide for confronting the three threats if they emerge and shows how to put in place the strategies that will keep the threats at bay.  

The “human library” has its roots in the city library in Malmö, Sweden, which allows curious visitors to check out living people for a 45-minute conversation. Th e experience is designed to confront prejudices and promote understanding. Th e people available to be “checked out” at one point included a gypsy, a transvestite, a blind man, a journalist and an animal rights activist. The conversations are intended to allow people to learn about the life and beliefs of an individual who has been misunderstood, stereotyped and often avoided.

Positioning your brand represents the short-term communication objectives, what it is you want to communicate, enhance or reinforce about your current brand. It is about your brand and how it differs from and is better than other brands. Jaguar isdifferentiated, in part, around design. Dove provides moisturizing. 3M offers innovation. Whole Foods Market has sustainable seafood. Framing has a bigger agenda.

A serious threat facing most brands in dynamic markets is the loss of relevance because the category or subcategory that they are serving is declining. Customers are no longer buying what the brand is perceived to be making. New categories or subcategories are emerging as competitors’ innovations create “must haves.” Remarkably, this dynamic can happen even if the brand is strong, customers are loyal and the offering has never been better, thanks, in part, to incremental innovations.

Look at any product category and the answer is the same. All of the meaningful changes in market position and sales of individual brands occur only when the brand creates a “must have” for which competitors lack visibility and credibility to be considered. However, most fi rms seldom foster such innovation and bring it to market—and in most cases, it is not because there is a lack of resources. Firms that are profi table and successful are actually less likely to fund market-changing innovation than fi rms that are struggling or in crisis. Why? One answer is the curse of success, which can take several forms.

The only way to grow, with rare exceptions, is to engage in substantial or transformational innovation that will be a game changer, that will create new categories or subcategories defined by qualities that customers deem “must haves” and protected by actively managed competitive barriers. Healthy organizations often have plenty of ideas that potentially qualify but get killed off before reaching the market. As a result, an opportunity to create a platform for real growth is lost.

Out of Aaker's five brand books, what precepts stand out as one of the top ten? Which are most critical “to do” tasks for someone charged with creating or managing a business? What do you need to know to excel at building a brand? 

David Aaker was profiled by Techronicle, the biannually published Business and Technology magazine for senior business leaders.

In this article, David Aaker shows how to identify the “must haves” and discusses barriers to competitors such as going beyond functional benefits, finding shared interests with customers, ongoing innovation, superior execution, scaling the concept, becoming an exemplar, and branding the innovation.
*Please note, there is a fee to obtain the full text of this article.

Winning the brand-relevance war involves engaging in substantial or transformational innovation to change what customers buy, to manage perceptions of the resulting new subcategory, and to build barriers to prevent competitors from overcoming their visibility and credibility barriers.

Winning the brand relevance competition requires finding the right “must have,” bringing it successfully to market and then growing the resulting business. The problem is that success breeds competitors and the benefits of pioneering a new category or subcategory can be short-lived. A key step is to create barriers such as ongoing innovation, a large group of satisfied or even passionate customers, proprietary technology and preempted distribution.

It is Econ 101: Create an environment with weak competition. The alternative, fi ghting the “my brand is better than your brand” preference war, is rarely successful at changing market positions because of the resulting customer momentum.

Aaker details one of the growth paths described in his book, Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant: Removing negatives, and reasons that people use when deciding to exclude your brand from consideration.

The only way to achieve real sales and profit growth is to create a new category or subcategory in which competitors are weak or irrelevant. It is Econ 101: Create an environment with weak competition. The alternative, fighting the “my brand is better than your brand” preference war, is rarely successful at changing market positions because of the resulting customer momentum. Successfully creating a new category or subcategory involves—in addition to finding a concept and introducing it into the marketplace—the active management of customers’ perceptions, attitudes and behaviors toward it. Here are five guidelines toward that end.

Arguably, Apple has created or refined and revitalized at least five new categories in a single decade—the iPod, iTunes, the Apple store, the iPad and the iPhone—which is an incredible achievement. There are many drivers of Apple’s success, such as the company’s flare for cool design, its focus on perfecting the user experience, its passionate customer base, its brand, its marketing, CEO Steve Jobs’ credibility and visibility, and more. However, one key ingredient that is usually overlooked is Jobs’ ability to get the timing right.

In this Q&A with Guy Kawasaki, David Aaker explains how to use branding as a weapon against your competition.

In his article David Aaker outlines how social media can augment the offering to create a new category or subcategory.

There are two ways to play the brand game, but which strategy delivers the strongest win? David Aaker presents concepts from his new book: Brand relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant and explains why creating new categories and subcategories for a new product pays off.

David Aaker's blog post about Brand Relevance as guest post on Jossey-Bass.