To Have an Edge, a Brand Has to Be Different, Relevant — and Have Energy

Kevin Plank knows how to build a brand, and he knows how brands get built. No, these thoughts are not redundant. They each, in their own way, have something to do with what it takes to gain an edge in the marketplace. Let me explain.

For those who may not be into sports, or even sporting goods, Kevin Plank is the founder and president of Under Armour, a company he launched in 1995 when he was a walk-on special-teams football player for the University of Maryland. Tired of constantly having to change during the course of a game when the T-shirt he wore under his jersey would become heavy and sweat-soaked, he noticed that his compression shorts stayed cool and dry — they were made of a polyester blend that wicked away moisture. Like many brand entrepreneurs, he had an "aha!" moment. Or, as Jerry Seinfeld might put it, "Ever wonder why no one's ever developed a T-shirt using the same moisture-wicking fabric out of which the shorts are made?" Working in his grandmother's basement, Plank set out to see if he could come up with a shirt that would remain drier and lighter and perform well under the most extreme conditions. After a year of fabric sourcing and product testing, he created just what he was looking for — times three: a shirt, a new category of sporting apparel called performance apparel, and a brand that would rocket in revenue from $17,000 in 1996 to more than $1 billion today. Under Armour now holds nearly 3 percent of the sports apparel market in the United States, holds a significant place in the global market, and sells everything from shirts (of course) and shorts to cleats, to underwear and outerwear, to gloves and shoes. Its clothing is worn by teams at more than 100 universities, and by professional players of football, baseball, basketball, golf, rugby, ice hockey, and even mixed martial arts, and its products have been proudly placed in movies, including Any Given Sunday, and television shows, including Friday Night Lights. The Under Armour logo, an interlocking "U" and "A," is fast becoming as recognizable as the Nike swoosh.

Plank launched a new sportswear brand that is now among the category's fastest-growing sectors. He did it by identifying something different that people, specifically athletes, really cared about. He saw the opportunity to fill a gap in the sportswear market to which no other company, not even Nike or Reebok, had laid claim. And he did it with products that don't just promise to be relevantly different but are different — they perform like champs. More than this, Plank is determined not to become a one-hit wonder. His product development teams are focused on coming up with new fabrics, applications, and designs that will keep the brand in the center of its field. Athletes of both the professional and weekend variety swear by this brand of gear, and they're fierce advocates. Under Armour's trademarked rallying cry "Protect This House" can not only be heard at athletic events worldwide, it's the heart of the brand's bold idea.

Kevin Plank built a brand on a relevantly different idea. And from a procedural point of view, he understood that this is how great brands get built. Unlike the premise pitched by The Pitch, and assumed by many folks, building a brand does not start with awareness — a great advertising campaign or promotion that alerts consumers to the fact that you're out there. In terms of building a brand, this is backward. To achieve success in brand building, the first thing you need to do is identify a differentiated meaning for your brand and determine if it really matters to anyone. Is there a large enough audience of people who will care? It's only after you do this that you can think about generating awareness. Consumers need a way to make a distinction between one brand and another. This is how they form preferences and make choices.

One of the most respected proprietary tools in the industry proves this point. Named Brand Asset Valuator (BAV), it was created by Y&R, an agency that is part of the same communications family as Landor, the company for which I work. BAV is an incredible diagnostic tool for figuring out how your brand is performing relative to all other brands in the market — not just the brands in your category. More important, however, is that, unlike many other brand valuation tools that attempt to place a current dollar value on the brand, BAV indicates what you must do to keep your brand strong. BAV can gauge the current health of your brand, project its future health, and indicate prescriptive actions. Why is this important? Ask Kevin Plank or the leaders of any other brands with an edge. Odd as it may sound, Wall Street doesn't just care about the value of your brand today. It cares about whether you can increase its value tomorrow.

The key challenge for brands has always been the ability to increase their dominance. BAV is a great indicator of whether this will happen and how this will happen, and the way it works is actually pretty simple. It's based on the interrelationship of what started out as four criteria, but as the result of how the marketplace has changed over the past few years, now includes a fifth.

• Differentiation — what makes your brand unique

• Relevance — how meaningful this difference is to the people who matter

• Esteem — how well regarded your brand is in the marketplace

• Knowledge — how well consumers know and understand your brand

• Energy — how dynamic the brand is, reflective of its ability to adapt and evolve

Brands generally get built one dimension at a time, with differentiation being the first, most critical step, and relevance an obvious second. A healthy brand has high levels of both difference and relevance. It's unique in a way that's meaningful to lots of people. Target is a perfect example, as are Dove, Clorox, and Gatorade. A strong niche brand has a high degree of differentiation and is relevant to a smaller group of people. This might be a brand like lululemon athletica, which with almost no advertising has cultivated a devoted group of yoga enthusiasts, or a luxury brand, such as Rolex, whose devotees are likely to have deep pockets and an appreciation of fine timepieces. If a brand stays relevant but starts to lose what made it different, it will become a commodity. Wall Street begins to worry. If it loses what made it relevant, same story. All healthy brands have a greater degree of differentiation than relevance, which gives them room to expand both their offerings and their audience.

Esteem and knowledge, the second pair of criteria, make up a brand's stature. If a brand has a higher level of...