Some companies are successful and some brands play an integral part in their customers’ lives. What sets the successful apart from those that aren’t? Andy Colville, in her book of the same name, argues that it is relevance. The company/brand needs to break through the clutter and mean something to the customer. This leads to the obvious next question, “How to make your company relevant”?
How To Make Your Company Relevant?
To make something relevant you can’t try and be everyone. Something that everyone is okay with is likely to be bland. Bland isn’t going to be the first choice of anyone. To be relevant you need to stand out — you must be differentiated in some way. Relevance inevitably involves being known and being differentiated. If customers don’t know, or care about, your brand it isn’t likely to be relevant.
Furthermore, you need to understand the customer to be relevant. A great lesson is that if you are going to ask questions you had better listen to the answer. Just asking a question doesn’t really do anything by itself. (This is a lesson Fred Reichheld probably should have learned before naming NPS the one number you need to know to grow, see here).
Colville shares her company’s Relevance Egg, their graphic presentation of the paths to relevance. In the egg, around the center of the self, are four ways that something can be relevant. These are using sensory ways, through thinking, by linking with values, and in establishing community connections. Making a connection through these is the way to make yourself relevant.
Examples From Business History
This short book also has a number of great business stories. Colville shares the example of TiVo. This was the breakthrough DVR. It was a technological leap forward from prior recording devices, e.g., the VCR. Unfortunately, the company didn’t really know how to sell it. Twenty something years ago, I remember seeing the commercials which claimed the new machine was a radical change. I believed them, yet, I still did not know what it actually did. It seemed cool but what did it have to do with me? It lacked relevance.
By the time TiVo discovered that perhaps its strongest selling feature was that it was easier to use than a VCR, it had squandered tremendous momentum. If its marketers had focused on a single insight/need and let reviewers consumers discover all of the other benefits on their own, TiVo–a great product–would likely have dominated the market.
Colville, 2014, location 581
A second example is the Oldsmobile. This brand was established in the 19th century by Ransom Olds before the brand joined the GM portfolio in the early 20th century. In the 1980s it had a stodgy image so a marketing campaign was designed to make it seem hipper. This famously said that the car it was “not your father’s Oldsmobile”. The problem, as Colville explains, was that the car, given its cost and features, was still not aimed at those buying their first cars. The traditional customers were alienated, and the new potential customers still thought it was an old person’s car because it was. It certainly wasn’t designed for their needs or budgets.
To be fair the marketers working on Oldsmobile seemed a bit doomed. The brand name has Old in the title. Car buffs might know that this is a person’s name, and not a description of the target market, but why battle fate? Brands might be accused of messing with names too much but in case of Oldsmobile why not give up on the Olds name and start again?
For more on differentiation see here
Read: Andrea Coville, (2014) Relevance: The Power to Change Minds and Behavior and Stay Ahead of the Competition, Routledge