become interwoven. Private banks may have a small group of customers, but to those customers they are highly relevant.

Customer intimacy could also be construed more widely as a thorough knowledge of what a customer group is concerned with or what needs they have. For example, Live Nation is a market leader when it comes to organising rock concerts. All they do really is bring artists, venues and visitors together, but they manage to do this in such a way that many of the concerts are sold out.

I therefore propose to replace the terms focus strategy and customer intimacy with the term ' customer relevance '. Customer relevance is the extent to which you are important to customers, know how to appeal to them and to catch their attention. It is that attention that makes it possible to sell products and services. Because of customer relevance, customers opt to also buy standard products or services from you, instead of from your competitors( Figure 10).

The big difference between customer intimacy and customer relevance is that the latter is argued from the perspective of the customer, and as such goes one step further. Today, a lot of businesses have a suitable range of products for their buyers, and they try to bring this to their attention. You will not be relevant until that what you promise is exactly in line with the needs of that one particular buyer at that time.

Brands are the carriers of customer relevance. This is owing to the various functions of a brand, of which recognisability is the most important. Users will attribute certain values and features to a brand, partly based on advertisements, and fill in the rest of the picture with their previous experiences with products and services offered under that brand.

Being relevant to a market is a sustainable competitive advantage, whether it is a small group to whom you are very important or a large group that values you for certain aspects. Customer relevance is linked to your business name or brand name and can be protected by committing your most important staff, by sharing customer and market knowledge in protected databases, and by translating this knowledge into the right combination of products and services.

If a business targets the market under various names brands, then you need to assess the relevance per brand. Thus, to most customers Unilever may not be relevant as a company, whereas brands such as Lipton or Dove may well be.

Figure 10. Development of differentiation on customer focus

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