Brand Race: How to Rise Above the Competition

• How “must-have” product innovations knock out competitors.
• Giving a weakened brand new energy and visibility.
• When to market the product category more than the brand.

Incremental product improvements to promote “my brand is better than your brand” have little impact on the market dynamics affecting market share. In industry after industry, the brand race is won instead by substantial innovations that define new categories or subcategories and thus make competitors irrelevant.

From Chrysler’s debut of the mini-van to salesforce.com’s shift from software to the cloud, substantial innovations can define a category, and truly transformational innovations can be game changers. The keys to winning brand relevance, says Dr. Aaker in this Stanford video, include timing your product innovations to market need (Apple), tapping underserved segments (Luna), building a robust customer relationship (Harley-Davidson), erecting barriers to competition in execution (Zappos), and becoming an exemplar brand (Prius).

David Aaker is professor emeritus of marketing and public policy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and vice chairman of Prophet. The author of numerous books, including Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, he earned his BS from MIT, and MS in statistics and PhD in business administration from Stanford University.