Our thinking is appearing in publications around the world

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.

James Walker and Kevin O'Donnell share their takeaways from the recent Consumer Electronics Show Las Vegas.

Consumer brands have invested billions to create experiences built upon distinctive combinations of products, services and people. Companies on the business-to-business (B2B) side, however, are typically less focused on creating customer experiences as a way to achieve competitive advantage. And that might seem to make sense. Yet a closer look shows that the attributes describing B2B winners – reliability, accuracy, quality, ease – are often the hallmarks of a great customer experience. 

2011 was a year filled with great partnerships. Who could forget William and Kate’s grand wedding watched by billions around the globe, or the unions of Reese Witherspoon, Daniel Craig, and Nick Lachey? There was also the 72-day marriage of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries -- okay, so maybe not all partnerships are meant to be.

It has become obvious that neither consumers nor businesses can evade the new digital world. As digitalization accelerates, its impact shows up not only through big players like Facebook, eBay, and Google, but also through digital media’s effect on the relationship between companies and customers.

Marketing is increasingly under pressure to make the most of its brands, its investments, and its organization. Although this pressure is particularly intense in tough economic times, the topic is increasingly relevant even in good times.

Many business leaders are making important strides in transforming their marketing strategies to address changing competitive environments, emerging product and service categories, and evolving customer needs. They’re thinking in terms of solutions rather than products, stakeholders rather than customers, and redefining rather than upgrading. To be sure, these are significant advancements. Too often, however, leaders expect new marketing strategies to be successfully executed with old marketing capabilities. The fact is that great strategic plans have failed in the absence of capability shifts.

Scott Davis and 7 other visionary marketers reveal their predictions for the marketing industry in the next decade in ANA Magazine.

Jay Milliken and Andres Nicholls discuss how strategy-led design and understanding customer behavior are the key elements for the success of Emart.

Philip Otley explains in his article why pricing may be the sharpest double-edged sword that senior management can wield in their bid to create value for the enterprise.

The ability to create and manage the customer experience is something more businesses would like to get right. It's an attainable goal. All it takes is the mindset combined with consistent and thoughtful deployment of tools that allow customer experiences to be monitored and optimized. 

In this article, Fred and Chiaki outline the concept of Signature Touchpoints, the third dimension of marketing, which is just as important as new product development or campaign development to achieve breakthrough in both B2B and B2C markets.

In this article Jeff Gourdji and Jeff Smith explain how to better connect business strategy and marketing execution.

Prophet strives to understand how executives in brand and general management are making strides in driving growth and building brand equity.

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.

In his article Tosson explains how to have a more easy-going approach to Social Media.