Brand Repositioning.

Cold open

It's 2009 and Old Spice is dying. This was your grandfather's brand, stuck with men over fifty. Old Spice kind of meant what it said. Retailers were taking it off the shelf.

Procter & Gamble owned the brand, and they had a choice. Gracefully let it die, or do something radical. So they went to Wieden+Kennedy.

Here is the insight they found. About sixty percent of body wash is bought by women: wives, girlfriends, mothers, not by the men themselves. So they made an ad that speaks to men, where the message is what women want their men to smell like.

It launched Super Bowl weekend in 2010 with Isaiah Mustafa, and the result was clear. Number one men's body wash in America, and sales doubled.

They never touched the soap. They changed the slot in your head. Same soap, new slot, and that is the whole game.

Welcome

I'm John-Luke. Welcome to Position to Win. There are two types of brands, the ones that accept their position in the market and the ones that challenge it. This show is for the challengers, and for the founders and CMOs responsible for making that change happen.

Today, repositioning.

Repositioning is the decision underneath

Last episode we talked about brand diagnosis, and the hardest finding is when the positioning itself is wrong. There is a clear treatment for that.

To reposition is to change 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, when you are trying to change how customers see you.

Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote Positioning in the 1980s and it is still one of the most important books in the category. Check out the book yourself. It is clear about owning a spot in the consumer's mind. Volvo owns safety. BMW owns performance. FedEx owns overnight shipping. If you live in New York, Amazon owns same-day. You get trained on the words repeated about a brand.

Positioning happens in the customer's mind. That is the only place it happens. If it is not changing in the customer's mind, there is no repositioning.

Ways to move a position

Old Spice went from your grandfather's cologne to confident, daring and modern. One way to reposition is to change who the competitor is, or how people see that competitor. Liquid Death did this by comparing themselves to beer.

Tylenol never argued it was more effective than aspirin, or that it had better benefits. They used the true weaknesses of the competitor. Aspirin went from a headache remedy in the consumer's mind to the harsher one, the stronger one, the one with more side effects. That gave Tylenol real strength.

Another way is repositioning out of the category. BlackBerry was a very well-developed smartphone, and then the iPhone arrived in 2007 as a pocket computer. It beat BlackBerry and Palm by moving the entire game and reframing it.

The positioning diamond

What are the variables that go into positioning? The easiest way I can answer that is the positioning diamond. This takes a little from Al Ries and a little from April Dunford's book, Obviously Awesome. Four key points, and they give you the perspective on what positioning includes.

Category sits at the top. This is the kind of thing that it is. Liquid Death is water. Not just water, an outrageous punk drink that is also a category leader, and it makes you feel cool. You can be descriptive here, but you also need to know exactly what the product is.

Audience is on the left. Who is it actually for. Figma is for designers working on product teams.

The alternative is on the right. Instead of using Figma, what is the alternative? The alternative can be a competitor, but it can also be another thing they do, another way they solve the same problem. With Slack it is not another chat tool. It is email. Slack differentiated by making email the alternative. Instead of emailing, use Slack.

Differentiator is at the bottom. What makes you unique, and specifically something nobody else can state.

Your positioning lives inside all four of these. Change one and your positioning changes. Change all four and you have an entirely different business. Put all four together and there is your positioning. That is what holds it together.

Find the open territory

Marty Neumeier has a good lesson in Zag. When everybody zigs, you zag. It is simple. Look at the category and find the common claims. Cross out what your competitors are already using. Find each claim of each competitor. Then ask what the open territories are. What is nobody else saying? What could you say that is the opposite, or the twist? Where are the open areas?

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

Four repositionings that worked

Burberry is a British luxury house, known for the trench coats, the bags, the high-end clothing and the signature plaid. In the late nineties that plaid got picked up by the working class and by knockoff brands, and everybody made a copy of it. As a luxury brand, the plaid meant less when everybody was wearing it. The luxury market stopped buying and it hurt sales.

So Burberry made a hard move. 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, after the brand adjusted, sales grew fifty percent a year and they were back in the luxury market.

Apple did something similar. About ninety days from bankruptcy, they claimed something Microsoft could not. They decided to be the brand for creatives and challengers, so they could raise pricing, because they could not compete on the same specs and win.

The product alone could not do that. The Think Different campaign trained the consumer's mind to see the brand as the one for people who think differently, and creators were immediately attracted to that message. That became the differentiator. It was not a faster machine. It was not better specs. It was the brand's value set. Everything else was built on that ground: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, all built after the repositioning happened.

Slack is a productivity tool that named itself the exact opposite of a productivity tool. That sounds like a category outlier, but the real move is that they did not compete inside the chat app category on better organization or better features. They said we are combating email. Everybody is using email, and if you are, you are doing it wrong. Welcome to Slack.

They positioned themselves as the alternative. Notice that email is not really their competitor. They avoided their competitors altogether and repositioned against a new way of working, a new habit, a new way of thinking. Slack refused the box of the category. The promise was not a better chat. It was seventy-five percent less email, and that is a new way to work.

Picking a bigger alternative to compare yourself to grows your ability to take market share. Slack passed the two billion dollar mark in under two years, faster than any app before it.

Positioning is surgery, not paint

So put yourself in the middle of that positioning map. What category am I in, what audience am I for, what are the alternatives, and what makes me uniquely different? Answer all four. If it is something your competitors can also say, it is category noise and you have no clear positioning.

A warning. Positioning is not an aesthetic. It is not a person deciding to wear a grey shirt instead of a black one. Positioning has to change something in the core of the business. It is surgery on the business. It is a change in total behavior.

If you move the positioning and you do not change the delivery, you create the gap we talked about last episode. You have to fulfill the expectation you set, because branding is building a reputation over time and you do not want to tarnish it. Make sure the product is good. These things do not live in isolation from each other.

Repositioning done well can revive a dying brand, wake up a sleeping one, or launch a growing one into hyperspeed. Done badly, it confuses the market, hurts the brand, and burns years.

Winners treat positioning as an asset and revisit it on schedule. It is not set it and forget it. They revisit because they understand how much it matters what consumers think of the brand. Losers wait for a crisis, hand it to a designer, and hope the logo fixes it and does the work on its own.

A new coat of paint does not move a building.

So do not think the aesthetic is going to solve the problem.

Next episode

Next episode we talk about when you actually need a rebrand. What signals justify the decision, how you know it is time, and what justifies the cost. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.