Genuine deformations of submanifolds II:the conformal case

We extend to the conformal realm the concept of genuine deformations of submanifolds, introduced by Dajczer and the first author for the isometric case. Analogously to that case, we call a conformal deformation of a submanifold $M^n$ genuine if no open subset of $M^n$ can be included as a submanifold of a higher dimensional conformally deformable submanifold in such a way that the conformal deformation of the former is induced by a conformal deformation of the latter. We describe the geometric structure of a submanifold that admits a genuine conformal deformation and give several applications showing the unifying character of this concept.