Brands don’t compete against one another, they compete against irrelevance.
One thing in the entrepreneurial and startup world many learn quickly is relevance is becoming more of a key performance indicator than simply revenue alone. This is something many large brands don’t understand and it is what will separate the winners from the losers in the next three years.
It’s interesting that brands don’t think like consumers. They think that Coke’s competitor is Pepsi. That Apple’s competitor is Microsoft or that P&G’s competitor is Unilever.
Such thinking is incorrect on several accounts. One is that consumers don’t weight one against the other anymore but one against many. Secondly, consumers weigh what brands are actually relevant when hedging their bets.
Many people do this with limited attention spans and bombardments of amplified information in the form of TV ads, digital banners, pay-per-click search ads, social ads, content and word-of-mouth from friends and family.
So to think you only have one competitor is antiquated thinking. Everyone is your competitor in the attention economy.
That’s because in this here today, gone tomorrow world of business, consumers could very much weigh how they invest in a brand whether it is relevant now or in the near future. They weight this relevance on a number of factors within context of their lives. So for many brand managers and planners who think they only have to worry about one or two competitors shows those people don’t have what it takes to make it in the 21st Century.
Taking a look at the number of startups that have made it from nothing to something in the past five years, most did not follow similar paths toward success. The new normal isn’t about business case studies because each business is unique in a world moving evermore toward customer control. While many finance articles point toward success from a revenue standpoint, such thinking keeps scrappy brands from paying attention to relevance as a key barometer.
In trying to define the health of a company or brand, so many have simply looked at profitability. But relevance may be a better predictive key performance indicator. What we’re finding out more and more in an always-on world is that simply being profitable doesn’t mean a business is relevant. So how do you measure for this?
There are new signals for brands that go beyond profit/loss. P&L is still an important indicator, but it shouldn’t be the only one.
Three Ways To Measure Brand Relevance
1. Social listening can help a company really see what anyone is saying about their service (or not saying) and get better indicators of what supply and demand is in the market for your product, service or solution. Several brands use this not only for customer service but negative feedback on products in order to shorten the feedback loop between requests for updates and actual updates. Some I’ve spoken with don’t even know what it is. They will be gone by next year as more social data becomes a barometer for feedback beyond the traditional survey.
2. Feedback loops for digital products can really be shortened with these user listening to iteration models where development teams have some sense of how customers use their products. If you have a better understanding in these areas, you may not add a button no one really will need or use on your app. Again, traditional surveys are too slow in an always on world. A brand that was irrelevant six months ago because of a poor product launch could be relevant now because of improving that product based on feedback loops.
3. Net promoter score shows how much one is willing to tell others about your product or service. This is a huge area in terms of relevance in that companies that at one time were highly irrelevant can once again be relevant with the proper maneuvering in the marketplace. This is how most good and services are sold now in our hyper-connected online/offline world and thus a better way for startups to monitor if their growth hacks are actually working in creating share of voice.
Relevance may not be the finite indicator to predict sustainability, but it makes more sense than simply tracking revenue or tracking how you compare to one competitor. Being worth $100 million today means more if you are relevant to customer demand, customer context, competitor supply and cultural moods.
Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.
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One comment
Katongole Johnny
December 22, 2016 at 7:49 pm
Hey Geoffrey Colon thanks for this Content
How do you create a relevant brand? Additional to your content for a brand to be relevant it must meet all three of the following conditions:
1. A product or service category or subcategory exists
2. There is a perceived need or desire on the part of a customer segment for the category or subcategory
3. The segment considers the brand as being material to the product category or subcategory
So a key question you need to answer is, “Does brand relevance play a role in my customers’ decision and purchasing process?” To determine whether brand relevance is important in your industry, you need to ascertain the following:
1. The role brand plays in comparison to other decision criteria (such as price, availability)
2. The importance of a brand in the decision criterion
3. The importance of buying branded products
4. The likelihood customers will buy a branded product even if they incur extra costs or efforts
5. The importance of a branded product in the purchase decision
Once you have this information, you can decide whether brand relevance is a critical measure of your marketing investments and worth measuring. If it turns out that brands are of low significance in a category, then your marketing efforts and dollars related to brand investments are highly inefficient and should be redirected to other marketing efforts that would be more beneficial. Therefore, brand relevance as a metric is irrelevant and a more appropriate marketing metric should be used.
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