Brand Repositioning Examples: Six Companies That Changed the Slot They Own

It is 2009 and Old Spice is dying. Your grandfather's brand, stuck with men over fifty. Retailers were pulling it off the shelf.

Procter & Gamble had a choice: let it die gracefully, or do something radical. They went to Wieden+Kennedy, who found one fact. About sixty percent of body wash is bought by women. Wives, girlfriends, mothers. Not by the men using it.

So they made an ad that talks to men, where the message is what women want their men to smell like. It launched Super Bowl weekend 2010 with Isaiah Mustafa. Number one men's body wash in America, sales doubled.

They never touched the soap.

They changed the slot it occupies in your head. Same soap, new slot. That is repositioning, and that is the whole game.

What repositioning actually is

Repositioning is changing how a brand is perceived in the customer's mind.

A rebrand, a redesign, a new website, new packaging: those are outputs. Repositioning is the decision underneath them.

Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote Positioning in the 1980s and it holds up. The argument is about owning a spot in the consumer's mind. Volvo owns safety. BMW owns performance. FedEx owns overnight. In New York, Amazon owns same-day. You get trained on the words repeated about a brand until the word and the brand are the same object.

Positioning happens in the customer's mind. That is the only place it happens. If nothing changed in the customer's mind, no repositioning occurred, whatever the invoice says.

The four corners of a position

Every position sits on four things. Change one and the position changes. Change all four and you have a different business.

Category. The kind of thing it is. Liquid Death is water. Not only water: an outrageous punk drink that leads its category and makes you feel cool. Be descriptive here, and be precise about what the product actually is.

Audience. Who it is for. Figma is for designers working on product teams. If you have not settled this, start with the ICP.

Alternative. What they would otherwise do. It can be a competitor, and it can be another habit entirely. For Slack the alternative is not another chat tool. It is email.

Differentiator. What makes you unique, and specifically something nobody else can claim.

Put all four together and you have a position. Pull one out and it stops holding.

Four ways to move a position

Change the competitor. Old Spice moved from your grandfather's cologne to confident, daring and modern. Liquid Death compared itself to beer rather than to bottled water.

Use the competitor's real weakness. Tylenol never argued it was more effective than aspirin. It let aspirin be the harsh one, the one with side effects. Aspirin went from a headache remedy to the rough option, and that gave Tylenol its slot.

Leave the category. BlackBerry was a very good smartphone. The iPhone arrived in 2007 as a pocket computer and beat BlackBerry and Palm by moving the game rather than winning the one being played.

Change the alternative. Slack refused the chat category and pointed at email instead.

Six brand repositioning examples

1. Old Spice

Dying brand, wrong assumption about who was buying, no product change. The bottle never changed. Category stayed. Audience and alternative moved.

2. Tylenol

Never claimed superiority. Repositioned the competitor instead, and inherited the ground aspirin vacated. Proof that you can move your slot by moving somebody else's.

3. Liquid Death

Water, sold against beer. The category label stayed accurate while the alternative and the differentiator moved somewhere nobody in bottled water was standing.

4. Burberry

The trench coats, the bags, the signature plaid. In the late nineties that plaid got picked up by the working class and copied by every knockoff brand, and it stopped signalling luxury. The luxury market stopped buying.

New leadership pulled the plaid back and put it on fewer products, making it scarce again. Scarcity is what luxury runs on. If it is too accessible, it is not luxury. They walked away from revenue that did not fit. By 2006 the brand had adjusted and sales were growing fifty percent a year.

That is the hardest version of this work. Repositioning cost them revenue before it returned any.

5. Apple

About ninety days from bankruptcy, Apple claimed something Microsoft could not. The brand for creatives and challengers, which let them price above the spec sheet they could not win on.

The product alone could not do that. Think Different trained the market to see the company as the one for people who think differently, and creators came to it. The differentiator was not a faster machine or better specs. It was a set of values, and the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone were all built on that ground afterward.

6. Slack

A productivity tool named after the opposite of productivity. They did not compete inside the chat category on features or organization. They said everyone is using email, and if you are, you are doing it wrong.

Email was never really the competitor. Naming it as the alternative meant Slack was arguing for a different way of working rather than a better version of the same thing. The promise was not better chat. It was seventy-five percent less email. Slack passed two billion dollars in valuation in under two years.

Picking a bigger alternative grows the market you can take share from.

Find the open territory

Marty Neumeier has the shortest version of this in Zag: when everybody zigs, you zag.

Look at the category and list the common claims. Cross out what each competitor already uses. Then ask what is left. What is nobody saying? What could you say that is the opposite, or the twist?

If every competitor can say it, it is not your positioning. It is the category's noise.

The same test works on archetypes: find the character your category left uncontested.

Repositioning is surgery on the business

Positioning is not an aesthetic. It is not a person choosing a grey shirt over a black one. It has to change something in the core of the business.

If you move the position and do not change the delivery, you build a gap between what you promise and what you do. That is the distortion a brand audit is designed to catch, and it costs more than the old position did. Branding is a reputation built over time, and reputation is the thing you can spend faster than you earn.

Done well, repositioning revives a dying brand, wakes a sleeping one, or launches a growing one. Done badly, it confuses the market and burns years.

Winners treat positioning as an asset and revisit it on a schedule. Losers wait for a crisis, hand it to a designer, and hope the logo does the work.

A new coat of paint does not move a building.

When to do it

Repositioning is cheapest while the identity still fits the new position. The day it stops fitting, you are rebranding instead, and the cost changes shape. The repositioning window covers how to tell whether yours is still open.

Diagnose first. Positioning is one treatment among several, and the audit is what tells you it is the right one.

This is the written version of Position to Win episode 12. If your growth has slowed inside a position built years ago, that is what repositioning work is for.