Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant

Chapter 2. UNDERSTANDING BRAND RELEVANCE: Categorizing, Framing, Consideration, and Measurement

It is kind of fun to do the impossible.

—Walt Disney

I realized that my competition was paper, not computers.

—Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the first personal digital assistant, the PalmPilot

In this chapter we take a deeper look at relevance. Consumer psychologists and marketing theorists have done extensive work over the years using clever experimentation and insightful theory building that are germane to the relevance concept. Tapping their efforts will provide knowledge of the scientific underpinnings of relevance and add deeper and more textured insight into the concept and its applications.

The chapter starts with a discussion of categorization. At its ...