Market Relevance as Key to the ‘Super Brand’ Status

All the brands that have traversed through a difficult path to attain their goal of becoming Super Brands, share one thing in common: market relevance. It is impossible to become a Super Brand without achieving a certain level of market relevance. Both building a customer base as well as retaining it is hinged on the powers of a brand to remain relevant. 

With the constantly changing customer needs and expectations, brands are kept on their toes to differentiate their products from their competitors, while simultaneously meeting these new customer demands. The struggle at the heart of the issue remains about maintaining the existing credibility of the venture as well as preserving its image. 

How Do Super Brands Maintain Market Relevance?

Since Super Brands are known to be market disruptors and game-changers, they ensure that their approach to market relevance is also equally unique and different. While the pressure of adapting to the changing customer landscape remains prominent for Super Brands, they often choose to use this pressure fruitfully. 

Instead of developing strategies with short-term goals in mind, these brands opt for those that can make a difference in the long run. This far-sighted vision of most Super Brands helps make them the stalwarts they are today. These brands try disrupting the market with strategies that make them pioneers in whole new subcategories of products or services. By leveraging the boons of technology as well as marketing, these Super Brands create new categories of purchase- changing the very way customers approach a purchase. This hidden talent of ideating ways to not only remain relevant but also craft a new relevance standard makes Super Brands stay in the game for the long haul!

Thumb Rules for Super Brand-Level Relevance

Aspiring brands can take a page out of this playbook and achieve a similar level of market relevance by focusing on the following key areas:

Customer-Centric Approach

This one’s a no-brainer, as all brands that hope to be permanent players in the market must adopt a customer-centric approach, at all costs! There are no two ways about this core principle. Everything that the brand creates, markets, or sells in the market must be in-tune with customer requirements. In other words, brands have to keep their clientele in mind when ideating products and services as well as marketing them. Super Brands have mastered this approach because they have reached a level where they are able to gauge the needs of the customers even before the customers themselves realize it! Aspiring brands can attain at least a part of this astute outlook by simply analyzing the purchase patterns of their clienteles to derive insights. 

Amplify Your Differences

Brands that are aspiring for the Super Brand status must constantly try to amplify how and why they are different from the rest of their market competitors. Although achieving market relevance in the short run by focusing on following an imitation policy may seem tempting, in the long run, this strategy can prove to be detrimental. This is simply because your customers will deem your products or services to be easily replaceable. To avoid being dispensable, you must stop jumping on the bandwagon and try to establish your market edge. As mentioned earlier, Super Brands do so by inventing new categories of sales to sway customers to their side. Although this same strategy might not work for aspiring brands, they can definitely use a version of this plan to charter a distinctive course to market relevance. 

Experience is Key 

In the current market space, customer experience is undoubtedly the final deciding factor that separates successfully relevant brands from those that have amazing products but are unable to remain viable in the market. Super Brands make sure their touch points remain optimized. They work to ensure that their levels of customer engagement remain high, but at the same time, it also remains interesting and fruitful. Making customer experiences engaging is vital as most customers are likely to return to your brand only if they feel at home when interacting with it. Try to create a holistic experience, while also maintaining an overall level of consistency in your approach. This can help maximize your relevancy quotient!

Apart from these key factors, brands also have to remain innovative and creative, as without innovation, no brand can hope to attain a market edge. While stroking the fire of innovation, you must also try to make your brand decisions as authentic as possible, as this will help align your business model with the long-term goal of relevance. If these pointers are followed diligently, aspiring brands can surely attain the Super Brand status!