When to Reposition a Brand: First Check Whether Competitors Took Your Promise

Sales have flattened, and someone at the leadership table says it's time for new messaging. Before anyone agrees, put your headline promise next to your competitors', because when to reposition a brand depends on what that comparison shows. If your promise slid toward theirs, the brand drifted, and the fix is to go back to the position that used to work.

Most advice on repositioning starts from a change outside the company, like a new audience or a dip in sales, and heads straight for new messaging. It skips two questions. Did the brand wander toward the middle of its market? Did competitors move onto its ground?

Markets that feel crowded have usually converged: the trouble is that the companies in them say the same thing, however many of them there are. So the comparison comes first.

Your headline promise only means something beside your competitors'

Positioning is relational. A position is right or wrong compared with the other companies buyers weigh you against, and with what those buyers expect from anyone in the market. Read on its own, your homepage can't tell you either.

So start by putting the evidence on one page. Write down your headline promise as it reads on your homepage today. Under it, list the headline promises of the four to six competitors buyers really compare you with, taken from their homepages. Then add a line for what buyers expect as a given from any company in your market.

Now sort the column. Tag each competitor promise by the job it does for the buyer, count how often each job appears, and group them. Some promises show up on every homepage, and you can't win on those. Some show up on a few, which means you'd have to fight for them. Some show up nowhere, and that's where a position has room to live.

The column also shows which promises the market has used up. In education, for instance, homepage after homepage leads with equity and never gets around to explaining the company's approach or its view of the world.

A brand that drifted needs its old position back

Find what you said when the position was working: an old homepage, an early sales deck, the pitch from the year deals came easily. Put it beside today's promise. If the current version has slid toward the competitor column, that's drift.

Drift has a plain cause. Teams in the same market read the same research and watch the same leaders, and their messaging wanders toward one shared middle without anyone deciding it should.

The fix for drift is to go back to the original position and sharpen it. Alice Tybout makes the case for caution in Kellogg Insight's guide to repositioning a brand: once a brand has traction, "repositioning is a strategy of last resort, as it is likely to alienate the brand's core users." Her advice is that "once a brand's position gains traction, the goal is generally to build on that positioning."

The real reasons for brand repositioning come from the market rather than your own copy. Your original promise may now be the one every competitor makes. Buyers may no longer care about it. Or you may have lost the ability to back it up.

The first of those is the one most advice misses. If every competitor now makes your promise, the market converged around you, and the fix is a deliberate move relative to them.

Pick the direction of the move from the goal it serves

Brand repositioning strategies come down to direction: which way you move relative to everyone else. Most moves go away from competitors, toward a promise from the empty part of your column. That creates room and cuts down head-to-head comparison.

Sometimes the better move runs toward the market leader. Standing near it borrows its legitimacy. It can also make you the easy alternative for buyers who like what the leader offers but want something cheaper or slightly different. And it puts you in front of buyers who have already chosen the market and are now picking a supplier inside it.

David Deephouse's 1999 study of commercial banks framed this as a balance: "By differentiating, firms reduce competition. By conforming, firms demonstrate their legitimacy." His conclusion was that "firms should be as different as legitimately possible."

So name the goal before you choose the direction. Write it in one sentence, for the person who will approve the move, and check the direction against it.

Moving toward the leader works when it's a deliberate choice

The strongest objection to all this is that moving toward the leader is copying, and copying is how a market ends up saying one thing in the first place.

That's a fair point, and copying the leader is still a viable strategy. Take the leader's approach, undercut it on price or add a twist, and you'll appeal to a segment that wants what the leader sells on different terms. Deephouse's finding cuts both ways: as different as legitimately possible sometimes sits closer to the leader than a team expects.

The risk is that someone does the same to you. So make the move on purpose, for a goal you can name, and keep whatever difference the market will accept. The longer bet is a brand people identify with, one that ties your approach to a view of the world, and that takes investment. Which you choose depends on your goals and the kind of company you want to be.

A new category costs years of education before it sells anything

The first lever most teams reach for is a new category, because it feels like instant difference. The trade-off is easy to skip. Buyers have to understand the category before your product can sit inside it, and building that understanding takes education, money and time.

Gainsight took this route with "customer success." Anthony Kennada, its founding CMO, described the cost of creating a category on SaaStr: "Over the years at Gainsight, we've spent a lot of time (and money) to help the world understand what Customer Success actually is." One of his section headings reads "Customers Are Initially Interested in Education, Not Your Product." On the money, he's blunt: "The amount of capital required to create a broad level of awareness around a need that people don't know they have is non-trivial."

That account comes from Gainsight's own founding CMO, written in 2019, after the category had taken hold. He gives no spending figures, and he says nothing about companies whose new category never caught on. It's one company's first-hand account of what the route cost when it worked.

Most companies have neither the interest nor the money to build a category. Take this route only if you have both. Otherwise, reposition inside a market buyers already recognize.

The new position has to start from how the buyer already thinks

Most repositioning follows a straight line. State the need, show how the solution meets it, show results, add proof. All the weight lands on the solution, and the buyer is left to work out why your view of the problem should matter to them.

Reverse the order. First say how your view of the problem matches the way your buyer already thinks about it. Then show how the solution follows from that view.

Here's a made-up illustration. Say a firm does bookkeeping for restaurant groups. The straight-line version reads: restaurants need accurate books, we deliver a clean monthly close, clients get faster reports, here are testimonials. The connected version starts where owners already are. They judge a month by food cost. The firm's view is that books matter because they show food cost early enough to act on it. The service follows from that view: weekly cost reports, with the monthly close behind them.

Test the new promise against the same column

Put the new promise back on the page from the first step, beside the competitor promises and buyer expectations. Check which group it falls into. If it lands where someone else already stands, keep working on it.

Run the test against the right competitors. If the move narrows your market, the companies in the narrower market go in the column. A narrower market drifts to one shared promise just as easily, so narrowing on its own won't make you sound different from the firms that are left.

If you've built the column and can't tell whether you're looking at drift or a market that moved onto your ground, we're glad to talk through what it means for your brand.

New messaging can wait a week. The column of homepages takes an afternoon, and it tells you which problem you have.