The world never stands still—customer mindsets evolve, technology advances, and market trends shift overnight. Staying relevant is challenging but essential for your brand to thrive.
Assess your long-term marketing strategy. If your brand no longer feels vibrant, brand repositioning could reignite your spark, help you reconnect with your audience, and protect your brand’s value. Done well, repositioning sets your brand apart and keeps it relevant for years to come.
This guide explains what brand repositioning is, why it matters for brand health, and how to apply it effectively to secure a leading market position.
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What Is Brand Repositioning?
Brand repositioning reshapes a brand’s image to influence perception and strengthen appeal.
Harvard Business School Online Professor Jill Avery, who teaches the online course Creating Brand Value, explains: “Repositioning involves refining and rewriting the brand’s customer value proposition, and its associated brand storytelling, to refocus them on either a new consumer target, a new promise of value, a new competitive frame of reference, or new reasons to believe in the brand.”
Shifting a brand’s meaning isn’t easy. It requires creativity, precision, and commitment. When executed thoughtfully, repositioning strengthens customer sentiment, deepens engagement, and elevates the overall customer experience.
Why Brand Repositioning Matters
Brands that fail to evolve risk losing their market standing. Repositioning gives underperforming brands a second chance, helping retain customers and align with audience expectations.
Even leading-edge brands can discover opportunity gaps and expand their influence through a well-timed strategic update.
Key benefits of repositioning, as outlined in Creating Brand Value, include:
- Reaching untapped audiences
- Strengthening market position
- Keeping pace with trends
- Staying ahead of competitors
- Refreshing products and messaging
Effective brand repositioning transforms a brand—enhancing brand equity, unlocking new markets, inspiring creative brand extensions, and building emotional connections with past, current, and future audiences.
How to Reposition Your Brand
A brand’s value relies on its reputation. To drive growth, you must revitalize your brand’s identity.
“Brand repositioning can be achieved, but it’s not an easy thing to do because it requires convincing consumers to rewire the web of associations and the relationship they already have with the brand,” Avery says in Creating Brand Value.
Here are four key steps to guide you through brand repositioning, create messaging that resonates with customers, rejuvenate your struggling brand, and help you unleash the full potential of your brand portfolio.
Related: Listen to Professor Avery discuss how to build a winning brand portfolio on The Parlor Room podcast, or watch the episode on YouTube.
1. Assess Your Brand Health
Before repositioning, evaluate your brand’s current condition. Tracking your brand’s health reveals how customers perceive you, their loyalty, and whether your brand drives profits or drains your marketing budget.
Brand health encompasses perceptions, such as customer-based equity, and behaviors, including firm-based equity. Key factors include:
- Brand thoughts: Customers’ awareness, knowledge, and understanding
- Brand feelings: Emotional drivers shaping customers’ minds
- Brand attitudes: How your brand is positioned in customers’ minds
- Relational engagement: Strength of brand-consumer relationships
- Purchase and usage behaviors: How customers buy and use your products
“A healthy brand is one that customers recognize, have positive associations with, prefer over competitors, and purchase and use differentially in ways that are beneficial to the firm,” Avery says in Creating Brand Value.
Annual brand health checks help track progress, monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), and identify areas for improvement. If brand health is slipping, repositioning can reset your strategy and future-proof your marketing plan.
2. Conduct Customer Research
To uncover customer motivations—from a loyal brand community to curious prospects—brands use tools like perceptual maps and digital marketing audits to uncover what audiences value, expect, and associate with their brand. Research typically involves surveys or interviews that measure brand thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and engagement.
One real-world example highlighted in the course is Dove’s “Self-Esteem Project.” Responding to parental concerns about daughters’ confidence, Dove launched campaigns promoting body positivity. The Super Bowl advertisement “Little Girls” featured executives’ daughters sharing their personal experiences with self-esteem challenges.
By directly targeting parents, the commercial created a meaningful connection while repositioning Dove as a brand committed to nurturing the next generation of advocates.
“The Super Bowl spot was a very important moment to bring awareness to the issue, but also to help people see what they could do for the little girls in their lives,” says Sharon MacLeod, former Dove brand manager, in Creating Brand Value.
These campaigns reinforced Dove’s values, engaged target audiences, and strengthened brand loyalty.
3. Determine Your New Brand Position
Defining your organization’s top business goals is critical for effective repositioning. Market research and brand health assessment insights should be combined with market trends, your brand’s differentiators, and its competitive positioning.
Revamping a brand can be exhilarating, but it’s equally important to maintain core elements as it is to define the brand’s mission. Avery underscores in the course that brand meaning is co-created by many stakeholders, stating, “While we may try to reauthor our brand story, it’s only when it’s accepted by consumers and the public at large that we have successfully repositioned our brand.”
Mike Moynihan, the senior vice president of brand, marketing, insights, and partnerships at the LEGO Group and an HBS lecturer featured in Creating Brand Value, emphasizes that a brand’s mission must remain clear during repositioning.
Brands often align with cultural trends, such as sustainability and social issues, to strengthen their positioning. LEGO, for instance, began by researching emotional drivers and customer needs, discovering that nearly seven in 10 parents felt their cities lacked safe, accessible play spaces.
As Moynihan explains in Creating Brand Value, “We’re working with the UN to establish a world play day and other major partners to really change the narrative around the way that childhood is actually spent right now with the reduction of free time spent on play.”
By carving out a distinctive role in addressing this social concern, LEGO set itself apart from competitors while deepening its cultural relevance and increasing awareness among audiences who connected with its new positioning.
4. Put Your New Brand Position into Action
After defining your new position, the next step is to design a plan that guides customers through the buying journey, ensuring they remain connected and engaged as the brand evolves.
Amy Murray, McDonald’s vice president of global marketing, notes in Creating Brand Value that repositioning succeeds when it aligns with market demands. For McDonald’s, this meant responding to families’ growing interest in healthier and more sustainable options. Working with nutrition experts, the company updated Happy Meals to include apple slices, milk, juice, and water.
“The core makeup of the Happy Meal is the same,” Murray explains in the course, “but a lot of the components have changed to stay with the times, stay with nutrition, and where we need to be.”
McDonald’s also pledged that all future Happy Meal toys would be made entirely from sustainable materials—modernizing the product while preserving its authentic
promise of fun.
Similarly, Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” also featured in the course, reshaped brand perception by moving beyond decades of advertisements
that lacked diversity. By highlighting women of different ages, shapes, and backgrounds, Dove reframed its message around self-acceptance.
“The new positioning brought Dove into a new conversation about beauty, one that provoked debate and discussion about what real beauty was and one that was designed to change the way society viewed beauty,” Avery says in Creating Brand Value.
Through this repositioning, Dove replaced an outdated narrative with inclusive messaging and creative assets that aligned with evolving cultural expectations—strengthening its brand health and ensuring continued relevance with customers.
Transform Your Brand Health with HBS Online
If your brand health is slipping, strategic repositioning can restore credibility, open opportunities for brand extensions, and keep your brand top of mind.
While repositioning takes time, when executed thoughtfully, it builds lasting equity, fuels growth, and delivers a meaningful return on investment (ROI).
Ready to reposition your brand to keep its health on track? Explore Creating Brand Value—one of our online marketing courses—and download our free course flowchart to explore our course options and see which is best suited to your marketing goals.
