What is Repositioning?

As the name suggests, repositioning is the process of changing a target market's understanding or perception of a product or service. Maybe that market is no longer worth your while. Maybe that market has rejected your otherwise totally innocuous product. Or maybe your product is seeking to be a darling to an entirely new market.

Positioning of the product indicates what customers think about its features and how they compare it to the competing products. It need not be a change in the product itself - speaking in purely manufacturing and product makeup terms here. As the intangible parts of a product certainly need to be enhanced to appeal to a more demanding audience.

Further, the demand for a product also has changed with time. Any company, at first has a higher demand in the market and then gradually their demand decreases due to several situations getting in their way.

Then to maintain the brand value and their position in the market they need to reposition themselves by completely altering the product. But in many cases rather in most cases, repositioning is often a challenge, especially for a brand that is well known to the public. We all know the challenges that both Nokia and Blackberry faced while trying to reposition themselves. They were otherwise pretty successful phone manufacturers in their own right. But the challenge proved too much for them.

Many strategies can help create repositioning of the company’s brand name. Some of those strategies to reposition may include

Advanced features:

There is a possibility that some features of the product are not liked by the customers. So, we focus on solving that problem by adding some extra and more relevant features,

These changes can be done and maybe customers would get admired by the efforts of the company and start to love the brand again. That is how they managed to come out with such features that were missing and then the company tried to find out the thoughts and ideas of the customers. There are many reasons for a company to reposition itself; maybe they want to create a unique and striking effect by featuring something new and admirable to the customers, maybe there was no money left in the company as they were losing the customer’s interest and demand. So, for that purpose, they need to reposition themselves.

Further repositioning cost far less in effort as well as in money. Imagine the tons of R&D and advertising money that should be thrown around to accomplish a simple rebranding. We can say that repositioning is better than rebranding. As the name suggests in rebranding, the company has to rebrand a new product or give a new brand name to a new product which will not be so effective until and unless there is some variation and uniqueness seen. Otherwise, repositioning is a better choice where the company needs to change the perception of the customers and again tries to generate demand, gain trust and loyalty towards the product.

With this I conclude, rebranding may be far more impressive but a conscious repositioning effort is both light on the pocket and also on the mind.

Sun Tsu said in his epic book, The Art of War, to reward the general who wins consistent small victories but to tolerate the general who wins impressive victories. As a small war indicates the mastery of that general to so utterly decimate the opponent that it feels like a small victory for you.

Be that General, strive for small consistent victories rather than seeking glory and have your fingers burnt for it.