Brand Repositioning

t's 2009 and Old Spice is dying. Your grandfather's brand. Retailers pulling it off the shelf.

So the agency finds one thing: about 60% of body wash is bought by women. They build an ad aimed at men that sells what women want their men to smell like. Super Bowl weekend, 2010. Number one men's body wash in America.

They never touched the soap.

They changed the slot it occupies in your head. Same product, new position, and that is the whole game.

Episode 12 of Positioning to Win. The four corners every position sits on, four ways to move yours, and why Tylenol never argued it was better than aspirin.

Positioning is not an aesthetic. It's surgery on the business. A new coat of paint does not move a building.

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So it's 2009 and the brand Old Spice is dying. This was your grandfather's brand. It was stuck for men over 50. It literally, Old Spice kind of meant what it said. And so the retailers were taking it off the shelf, and Procter and Gramble owned the brand. They had a choice. Either they gracefully let it die or they do something radical to change the brand. So they contracted Whiteon and Kennedy. And here's their insights. About 60% of body wash purchases are bought by women. Or wives, girlfriends, mothers, and not by the men themselves. They created an ad that speaks to men, but the messaging is what women want their men to smell like. This launched Super Bowl weekend in 2010 with Isaiah Mustafa, and the results were clear. This was the number one men's body wash sold in America, and the sales clearly doubled. So the point is that they never touched the soap. They changed the slot in your head of how you think of the brand. It's the same soap, it's a new slot, and that's the whole game. I'm John Luke. Welcome to Position to Win. There are two types of brands, the ones that accept their positioning in the market and the ones that challenge it. And this show is for the challengers and the founders and CMOs who are responsible for making that change happen. So today we're going to talk about repositioning. If you remember the last episode, we talked about brand diagnosis. And the hardest learning is that when the positioning itself is wrong, and there's a clear treatment for that. But to define the positioning is to change how a brand is perceived in the customer's mind. A rebrand, a redesign, a new websites, a new packaging, these things are just outputs. But reposition is the decision underneath when you're trying to change the perspective of how consumers and how customers see you. Al Rice and Trout have a positioning book in the 1980s, and it's still one of the most important category. You know, feel free to check out the book yourself, and it's clear about owning a certain spot in the consumer's mind, right? We have Volvo that owns safety, BMW that owns performance, and FedEx, who's overnight shipping. If you live in New York, you got Amazon that's same-day shipping, right? You get train indees words that are repeated about a certain brand's aspect. So positioning happens in the customer's mind. That is the only place that it happens. If it's not changing in the customer's mind, then there's no repositioning. When you do repositioning, there's a few ways to reposition yourself. Old Spice went from the grandfather's cologne to the confident and daring and modern cologne. So a part of repositioning that you can do is you can reposition who the competitor is or how they view yourself of what your competition is. Liquid Death did this with comparing themselves to beer. So then Tylenol never argued about being more effective than aspirin or having better benefits. They used their true weaknesses of the other competitor. And then what happened is aspirin went from being in a consumer's mind from just being a headache remedy. They became the more harsh one, the stronger one, the one that has a little bit more side effects, which gave Thailand all real strength. Another key way of repositioning is the repositioning from the category. BlackBerry was a very well-developed smartphone, but then the iPhone came out in 2007 and became a pocket computer, beating Blackberry and the palm by moving the entire game and rephrasing this. What are the variables in that go into positioning? And the easiest way I can answer that question is through the positioning diamond. Okay, this is taking a little bit from Al Rice and a little bit from the book by Dunford. That's obviously awesome. And it really goes through four key points. And the key points give perspective on what positioning includes. So on one corner, you have category. Category is on the top. So this is the kind of thing that it is. So liquid death is water. It's not just water, it's kind of an outstanding punk drink water that's that's sold and it's a category leader. It's what it makes you feel cool. So you can be descriptive in this category, but it's also important to know exactly also what the product is. Then we have audience. Audience is to the left. Now, the audience is who is it actually for? So Figma is for designers that work for product teams. And then on the opposite side, on the right side is the alternative. So instead of using Figma, what's the alternative for them? Um, the alternative can be a competitor, but it can also be another thing that they do, another way that they solve that similar problem. So for example, with Slack, it's not another chat tool, it could just be that they are using emailing. And Slack differentiated themselves by showing themselves their alternative is emailing. So instead of emailing, use Slack. And then there's differentiator on the bottom, which is what makes you unique. And these things is not so you have the alternative, the audience, and the category. And differentiator is something that nobody else can state. Your positioning lies within all four of these quadrants. If you change one of these four, your positioning changes. If you change all of these four, then you are having an entirely different business. When you put all of these four together, there you have positioning. That's how positioning is being held together. If you change one of these four, your positioning changes. So Marty Newbyer in his book Zag has a really good lesson about positioning. And that's when everybody zigs, you zag. And it's pretty simple. You look at the category, what are the common claims, cross out what are your competitors using, right? Find each claim of each competitor. And okay, what are the open territories? What's something that nobody else is saying? Or simply what could you say that's also the opposite or the twist? Where are the open areas? If every competitor can say it, it's not your positioning, it's the categories noise. It just blends into everything else. How do you do repositioning and how do you stand out? So let's go through four different examples that positioning worked and what they did. So we have Burberry. Burberry is a British luxury company. They're known for their trench coats, their purse, their bags, their high-end clothing, and their signature plaid pattern. In the late 90s, that plaid pattern got picked up by the working class and by many off brands, and everybody created a knockoff of that plaid pattern. So as a luxurious brand, that plaid pattern meant less when everybody was using it. So the luxury market started not buying and then started hurting their sales. So what did they do? Burberry made a hard move. So the new leadership pulled back that plaid pattern and they put it on a fewer products, making it scarce again. Scarcity is what luxury runs on. If it's too accessible, it's not luxury. So they walked away from that revenue that did not fit. And by 2006, after the brand injusted, after they did the repositioning in the consumer's mind, then the sales grew by 50% a year and back into the luxury market. Apple did something similar. So Apple, about 90 days from bankruptcy, claimed something that Microsoft couldn't. They decided to be the brand for creatives, the challengers, to be able to elevate their pricing because they could not compete on the same specs and win. So they decide to form who's their target persona type so that they can elevate their pricing and become the premium brand for tech specs that wasn't created before. The offer alone could not do this. But the Think Different campaign trained a consumer's mind to reposition the brand as okay, this is for those people who think differently. And of course, creators were immediately attracted to that message. And that became a brand differentiator. It wasn't a faster machine, it wasn't better scopes, it wasn't a different type of customer. It really was a brand's value set. And then everything else was built from that front, right? We got the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and they were built with that ground of understanding after that repositioning happened that this is the brand for creatives. Another example, we have Slack, right? Slack is a productivity tool. They named themselves the exact opposite of a productivity tool. So that obviously sounds like a category outlier. But they didn't compete themselves inside the chat app category and try to provide messaging that's better and how they have better organization or better features in that. No, no, they told people, like, look, we're combating emailing. Everybody's using emailing it, and if you are, you're doing it wrong. Welcome to Slack. They're positioning themselves as the alternative. Notice that emailing is not so much their competitor, they avoided their competitors altogether to reposition themselves against a new better way of life, a new better habit, a new better way of working, a new way of thinking about things. So Slack refused the box of the category, and Slack's promise wasn't to get a better chat, it was 75% less emails. And that's a new way to work. Picking a bigger alternative to compare your brand to ends up growing your market share's ability to grow. Slack passed a $2 billion mark in under two years, which was bigger than any past chat apps have done. So when you look at yourself in the positioning map and you think about, okay, what category I am, what audience am I going for? And what are the alternatives in the marketplace? And what makes me uniquely different, you put yourself in the metal and you answer all those questions. If you answer those questions, you think, okay, if it is something that your competitors can say, then it's just part of the category noise and there's no clear positioning that you have. A key warning I want to bring up is that positioning isn't just an aesthetic thing. It's not the same as a human being saying, okay, all of a sudden I wore a black shirt and now I'm gonna wear a gray shirt or a blue shirt. Um, a positioning has to actually go through and change in the business core center. It's not just an aesthetic or just an appearance, it's surgery on the business. It's a way of changing the total behavior. If you move the positioning, you don't change the delivery, you can create that gap that we talked in the last episode that needs to be dealt with, right? So you want to make sure that you fulfill on that consumer expectation because branding is building a reputation over time. And you do not want to tarnish your reputation. You really want to make sure that the product is good. So these things do not live in isolation from each other. Repositioning done well can revive a dying brand. It can wake up a sleeping brand, and it can launch into hyper speed an already growing band. And done badly, it can confuse the market, it can really hurt the brand, and it burns years after years. Winners that treat their positioning as asset will revisit on schedule, meaning it's not a set in forget it. They're gonna revisit it because they understand the importance that is that the consumers think about their brand. Losers, they wait for a crisis and they hand it to a designer and they hope for their best and that the logo will fix it and that it'll do the work on itself. A new coat of paint does not move a building. So neither should you think that the aesthetic is gonna solve all the problems. So next episode we'll talk about when do you actually need a rebrand? What are the signals you're looking for to justify that decision? When do you know that it's the time, and what will justify the cost? Thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon. I'll see you next time.