BY DAVID AAKER

daaker@prophet.com
Remove Negatives to Remain Relevant
T
he thrust of the brand relevance
battle is usually to create an innova-
tion for your offering that adds a
must have that denes a new category or
subcategory and makes competitors
irrelevant. That is the surest way to grow
but not the only way. Another growth path
described in my book, Brand Relevance:
Making Competitors Irrelevant, is removing
negatives: reasons that people use when
deciding to exclude your brand from
consideration.
Te result can be a major expansion
in the market for which the brand is
relevant, or the stoppage or reversal of a
decline in relevance. Consider the cases of
McDonalds, Hyundai and Wal-Mart.
McDonalds was losing a fght for the
all-important breakfast and mid-morning
snack. Tose who wanted premium cofee
were excluding McDonalds and instead
going to Starbucks. Te solution was
McCaf, introduced in 2007 as an upscale
cofee line that included cappuccinos and
lattes. It did not pretend to be superior
to Starbucks, but it was good enough.
In the terms of Kevin Lane Keller, a
Dartmouth marketing professor and
industry thought leader, it became a point
of parity: a feature or ofering that the
competitors had in common. Te cofee
was no longer a reason to exclude
McDonalds from consideration and
therefore the group to which McDonalds
was relevant was signifcantly expanded.
At the turn of the century, Hyundai
was fghting the perception that Korean
cars were of poor quality, so programs
initiated in 1998 created cars designed and
manufactured to deliver high quality. By
2004, the brand went from near the bottom
to near the top of the J.D. Power Initial
Quality Study, an annual study that serves
as the benchmark for the quality of new
cars as determined afer 90 days of
ownership. Te low-quality perception,
however, lingered.
One approach to changing quality
perceptions was to ofer an aggressive
warranty branded as the Hyundai
Advantage, the industrys frst 10-year,
100,000-mile warranty on the powertrain,
marketed as Americas Best Warranty. Te
Hyundai Advantage program not only told
the quality story in graphic terms, but also
got enormous visibility. Te brands quality
image got another boost in 2008 when the
Genesis, a Lexus-level car, was introduced
and won the 2009 Car of the Year award at
the Detroit Auto Show. Te quality story
was supported by well-executed advertising
in the Super Bowl, the World Cup and other
prestigious televised events, as well as
through customer programs like the
Hyundai Assurance program, whereby
Hyundai ofered to buy back any cars if the
customers lost their jobs in 2009s down-
trodden economy.
Tere were other negatives for the
Hyundai brand. One was an image of having
a boring, utilitarian design. Te solution was
a visible design approach branded as fuidic
sculpture that resulted in cars that made
design an asset rather than a liability. Te
second negative, the foreign-made stigma
that was for some a compelling negative, was
reduced by the opening in 2005 of a
billion-dollar plant in Alabama.
Hyundai went from being an also-ran in
the U.S. car market to garnering about a 5%
share. Removing negatives was key to the
brands new marketing position and to
making Hyundai relevant enough to prompt
about 30% of the car-buying public to
consider its models.
In the early 2000s, Wal-Mart was
boycotted by 8% of the population and had
an unfavorable image among others. Tis
segment was disturbed by its treatment of
employees and suppliers, its huge program
to buy from China suppliers, its perceived
efort to destroy small retailers and its
callousness to the urban blight that was
associated with some of its new stores.
Wal-Marts eforts to remove the negatives
were inefective and ofen only served to
call attention to the problems. However, the
companys decision to embark on a
sustainability program that leveraged its
scale served to neutralize the negatives by
changing the discussion, by framing
Wal-Mart in a diferent light.
It all started on a camping trip in 2004
when the chairman, Rob Walton, was
challenged to become a leader in environ-
mental programs. Te result was a major
corporate initiative involving employees,
trucks, stores, warehouses, suppliers,
communities and customers. Te goals were
to reduce energy use for operations and to
encourage environmentally friendly
products in the stores. Fourteen networks
focusing on sustainability around issues like
logistics, packaging and forest products were
formedconsisting of Wal-Mart executives,
suppliers, environment groupsand
regulators helped in sharing ideas and
developing programs. A supplier sustain-
ability summit was held in Beijing to review
goals and report on progress.
Te program had resources and priority.
Its pace only increased when it was found
that it more than paid for itself with cost
savings and customer attraction. Te
resulting impact on energy use had
national signifcance. Importantly, it also
had an impact on the corporate image not
by removing the enduring negatives, but by
diverting attention from those negatives by
changing the dialogue about Wal-Mart.
Te tendency for all mangers is to
try to improve the ofering, to add
positives, but it may be more productive
to address negatives to make the brand
relevant to a larger group. However, it is
not enough to address the negatives
functionally. Tere needs to be a way to
credibly communicate the improvement
of negatives to a group that may have put
the brand in the graveyard, a place where
communication does not get through.
Prospective customers have no reason to
learn about a brand that they associate
with a compelling negative, so the story
of how that brand is addressing the
negative needs to be toldand doing
visible programs like McDonalds McCaf,
Hyundais warranty and design-conscious
innovations, and Wal-Marts focus on
sustainability can help. m
DAVID AAKER is vice chairman of
San Francisco-based marketing
consultancy Prophet and author of
Brand Relevance: Making Competitors
Irrelevant. To read past columns, go to
MarketingPower.com/marketingnews
and click on featured contributors.
Follow Aaker at Twitter.com/davidaaker
or on DavidAaker.com.
Wal-Marts decision to
embark on a sustainability
program that leveraged its
scale served to neutralize
the negatives by changing
the discussion.
14 MARKETING NEWS | JANUARY 31, 2012
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