• Your brand has a bad, confusing, or nonexistent image.
• Your brand lacks vitality. It is perceived as “old” or “tired.”
• The primary benefit your brand “owns” has evolved from a differentiating benefit to a cost-of-entry benefit. (For example, for airlines cost-of-entry benefits would be safe flights, needed routes, and required times.)
• Your organization is significantly altering its strategic direction.
• Your organization is entering new businesses and the current positioning is no longer appropriate.
• A new competitor with a superior value proposition is entering your industry.
• Competition has usurped your brand’s position or made it ineffectual.
• Competition has deliberately repositioned your brand in a negative way.
• Technology has disrupted your industry and your brand.
• A brand extension has repositioned the parent brand in a negative light.
• Research indicates that your brand is no longer unique or compelling.
• Research indicates your brand is not building an emotional connection to your target customer.
• Your organization has acquired a very powerful proprietary advantage that must be worked into the brand positioning.
• Corporate culture renewal dictates at least a revision of the brand personality.
• You are broadening your brand to appeal to additional consumers or consumer need segments for whom the current brand positioning won’t work. (This should be a “red flag” since it could dilute the brand’s meaning or make it less appealing to current customers or even alienate them.)

You follow the same steps and address the same brand design components when repositioning a brand as you do when first designing the brand. But, brand repositioning is more difficult than initially positioning a brand because you must first help the customer “unlearn” the current brand positioning (easier said than done). Three actions can aid in this process:

1. Carefully crafted communication – you must skillfully move the person from what he or she currently believes about the brand to what you now want him or her to believe about the brand
2. New products and packaging that emphasize the new positioning
3. Associations with other brands (e.g., cobranding, comarketing, ingredient branding, strategic alliances) that reinforce the new brand positioning

You should not rely solely on an advertising agency, a brand consulting firm, or your marketing department to craft your corporate or organizational brand’s design. This is so critical to your organization’s success that its leadership team and marketing/brand management leaders should develop it themselves, preferably with the help of a brand positioning expert.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

What is the difference between repositioning and rebranding?

Thanks for your question Lisa. Rebranding has become quite popular, especially for brands that want to shed a previously negative image. For instance, Philip Morris rebranded itself to Altria. Or brands that are facing increased competitive pressure like McDonald’s. Rebranding is simply changing the brand’s identity. It typically includes changing most or all of the brand identity elements such as the name, icon, colors, type font and tagline. The identity change may also be accompanied by brand repositioning.

However, a brand can be repositioned without changing its identity. Repositioning focuses on changing what customers associate with the brand and sometimes competing brands. This usually entails a change in the brand’s promise and its personality. Taglines often change with brand repositioning (to communicate the new promise). And sometimes the identity itself is updated or refreshed to reinforce the change in the brand’s positioning. However, most brand repositioning projects do not result in completely changed identities. That is, usually the brand name does not change. And frequently, neither do the identity elements other than the tagline and perhaps a slight identity system updating.

Another way to envision this is to think of a brand as a person. If a person rebrands himself, he gains or loses weight, changes his hairstyle and color and wardrobe and perhaps changes his name. If the person repositions himself, he changes his values, attitude, personality or behavior. Any combination of these changes can occur together or separately.

In summary, rebranding is an identity change. Repositioning is a change in the brand’s promise, personality or other associations. These changes can be performed together or separately.

Do you have a question related to branding or growth? Just Ask The Blake Project

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

As a baby boomer, I remember Abercrombie & Fitch. It was a very traditional, outdoorsy, hunt club oriented brand. It felt a little bit like L.L. Bean or Orvis. Today, it is a completely different brand. It is hot and sexy and targets teens. In fact, not too long ago it was in the news for the controversy around its featuring semi-nude models at the entrances to its mall stores. At one time Reebok was known as an athletic shoe brand targeted at young women and aerobics. Today, it is successfully re-targeted at the inner city hip-hop generation.

How do some brands get away with such a radical transformation of target audiences and brand meanings while others struggle to appeal to different markets?  For instance, McDonalds was not successful with its adult-oriented Arch Deluxe menu item and Volvo has had limited success with its performance (versus safety) based models.

At The Blake Project, we believe that brands that are successful with these radical transformations are successful for a number of reasons:

•They are forced to change direction due to their brand’s declining core markets.

•They completely reposition the brand. They do not try to extend just portions of the brand into new market segments. There are no stretched, inconsistent or multiple brand meanings. The meaning is radically and permanently altered.

•They ‘bet the future of the brand’ on the repositioning. That is, they carefully plan, invest heavily in and flawlessly execute the new position.

•The marketing strategies and tactics completely change to address the new target audiences.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

1. Identify. Ordinary bananas became better bananas when a small Chiquita label was added to the fruit. Dole did the same for pineapple with the Dole label, as did the lettuce people by putting each head into a clear Foxy lettuce package. Of course, you then have to communicate why people should look for these labels.

2. Personify. The Green Giant character became the difference in a family of vegetables in many forms. Frank Perdue became the tough man behind the tender chicken.

3. Create A New Generic. The cantaloupe people wanted to differentiate a special, big cantaloupe. But rather than call them just plain “big,” they introduced a new category called Crenshaw melons. Tyson wanted to sell miniature chickens, which doesn’t sound very appetizing. So it introduced Cornish game hens.

4. Change The Name. Sometimes your original name doesn’t sound like it would be something you would want to put in your mouth. Like a Chinese gooseberry. When the name was changed to kiwi fruit, the world suddenly had a new favorite fruit that it wanted to put in its mouth.

5. Reposition The Category. Pork was just pig for many years. All that did was conjure up mental pictures of animals wallowing in the mud. Then the industry jumped on the chicken bandwagon and became “the other white meat.” That was a very good move when red meat became a perceptual problem.

Excerpted from my book REPOSITIONING: Marketing In An Era of Competition, Change, And Crisis — Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin (c) 2010 by McGraw-Hill

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Few people know that Spain is truly the dominant producer of olive oil. It generally produces more  than half the world’s olive oil. Italy, the number two producer, has only half Spain’s production. In fact, Spain outproduces all other countries combined.

But there is a big problem: while Spain is the dominant leader in olive oil production, many people perceive Italy as the king. Because of that, Spain makes most of the oil, while Italian companies make most of the money with their olive oil brands. How do they do it? They buy their olive oil from Spain, put it in their cans and bottles, and ship it off as Italian olive oil. What should Spain do? That was a question we were asked by the Spanish producers. Our answer came in three steps.

Step 1 was to clearly reposition Spain as “the world’s number one producer of olive oil.” This little-known fact had to be put into the minds of the customers and prospects for olive oil. Spain’s production credentials were an important part  of the message. Outproducing all competitors combined is a great story. But Italy was already in people’s minds, so a way had to be found to reposition it as a producer that used Spanish olive oil.

Step 2 dramatized this message by borrowing a historical fact. We suggested that Spain produce advertising that stated the following:

Two thousand years ago the Romans were our best customers. Today, they still are.

The point this message makes is that the Italians have always recognized good olive oil when they tasted it. Since Italy is known for its cooking, this is a very meaingful idea. But there was one other  problem.

Step 3 was that of identification. If people were to look for Spanish olive oil, how were they to find it? So we developed  a symbol or seal that enabled customers to identify oil from Spain. It was a simple seal that said, “100% olive oil from Spain.” This seal was to be put on every can and bottle of pure Spanish olive oil.

This turned out to be the Avis number two program in reverse, as we repositioned Italy where it belonged: in second place.

Excerpted from my book REPOSITIONING: Marketing In An Era of Competition, Change, And Crisis — Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin (c) 2010 by McGraw-Hill

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers