Through our work with many brands we’ve developed a framework for classifying competitive advantages. This simple classification is derived from the customer’s perspective on brand selection – namely how a customer might consciously or sub-consciously choose one brand over another. It all boils down to four simple “utilities” that matter to customers and that marketers can use to gauge their brand versus its competition.
- Functional Utility – How does the brand perform? Does it get the job done?
- Economic Utility – Is the brand worth the cost?
- Emotional Utility – Does the brand inspire confidence, satisfaction or enjoyment?
- Social Utility – What does the brand say about me to others?
Any brand must deliver on at least one of these advantages to be considered or purchased. The bigger challenge, though, is sustainably delivering on one’s advantages, or customer utilities, over time as competitors emerge and evolve to chip away at one’s market share.
How does a marketer use this list of utilities to build, enhance and protect the brand? These categories, and appropriate sub-categories, frame the criteria a marketer might use to conduct regular marketing research on customers’ relative comparisons of one’s brand to competitive brands. By structuring marketing research, product development and brand communications to provide insight to performance against these criteria, a marketer will have a continuous flow of intelligence on the customers’ perceptions of brand strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). With this sort of brand monitoring in place, the marketer has a navigation system for the brand’s evolution to keep it on course.