Rebranding vs Repositioning 101 – What’s the difference?

Have you ever been stuck trying to figure out why your business isn’t growing? Maybe you’re not hitting your revenue numbers or building a customer base as you had hoped. You may need to rebrand or reposition your company.

REBRANDING VS REPOSITIONING

What is rebranding? What is repositioning? Do they work together?

Rebranding doesn’t always involve repositioning but repositioning most often will involve some degree of rebranding.

What is the distinction?

REBRANDING

Rebranding is when your company or product is in the market or preparing to go to market and there has been some degree of failure, pushback and adoption has been slower than anticipated. This is the time to consider a refreshing your brand. You might reconsider changing the name to make it more interesting or relevant to the target audience. You may need to evaluate your entire brand experience, visual voice or color palette.

Startups are often in a rush to release their first product and get to market as soon as possible often leading to the neglect important foundational pieces of the business, like really understanding who your target audience is and building your brand around them.

Creating a brand is a process that doesn’t happen overnight. There will inevitably be edits, revisions and changes.  If it is not working, it is ok to make changes. This could be your final attempt to build a stronger brand.

Sprout loves working  with companies that have something new and exciting in the market or that just want to make their brand better. We have helped launch or reposition over 300 companies and would love to help yours.

REPOSITIONING

We’ve covered rebranding. Now, what is repositioning?

Repositioning is finding and creating a space for your company in a different part of the market or a different market altogether. Sprout helped launch a company that was originally in the problem management space within the help desk market. Problem management, at that time, had about 130 competing companies focused in it. We realized quickly that we’re going to struggle to get any sort of piece of that market. We continued to look at different markets and saw a secondary market that was part of problem management, called knowledge management. Knowledge management at that time had seven competitors in the market. We knew we could play there much better.

We had taken a newly started brand that got us some experience and we basically stripped that away and came out with the real brand focused – on knowledge management, with a company name that focused on knowledge management. A year and a half later we sold that company to a problem management company.

It was a perfect experience. By repositioning and finding the right market, finding the right acquirer, and entering a market with less competition, we were able to make the perfect exit.

If your brand is struggling, please feel free to reach out and we would love to help you achieve your business goals.

Prefer to Listen?