Words: Caroline Petvin – Content Director
Category(s): Branding, Positioning
Date: 7th June 2023
“If someone’s going to disrupt your narrative, best if it’s you.”
The eminently quotable Andy Raskin, rounded off a recent LinkedIn post with this remark and it got us thinking about situations where brands might need to change their story.
Because no brand story should be static – no matter how powerful it is.
As your business and the world around you changes, your stories must inevitably evolve to stay meaningful to your customers. You’ll need to plan for change and regularly review everything from your visual identity to your strategic narrative to make sure it’s still relevant and impactful.
For the most part this will be an iterative process, where you listen, learn and make small changes to optimise your ideas and stories. But from time to time a more significant change to the core brand narrative might be required, which can be a really hard decision for established brands that have been telling one story for a long time and feel it’s an integral part of their DNA.
To understand some of the situations where you may need to be the disruptor of your own narrative, it’s useful to refer to the simple ‘three Cs’ positioning model, which suggests you should position on:
- Customer: what do they want from your brand?
- Competition: how can you be different or better than them?
- Company: what promise can you deliver on?
When your brand story no longer ticks all three boxes, it’s a pretty clear sign you’re ready for a change.
Let’s take a look at some examples, starting – where you should arguably always start – with what the customer wants.
Customer: Their needs have evolved
When brands establish their strategic narrative at the start-up or scale-up phase, it’s often focused on one particular product or solution (or even one specific feature of that product or solution) that they know their customers need. That approach might get you so far, but as your customers’ needs evolve, you’ll need to revisit your brand story and try it on for size, to make sure it hasn’t become too restrictive.
Sometimes this just requires taking your existing narrative and moving it up a stage of two of the benefit ladder. The benefit ladder is a simple concept where you position your brand based on product features, functional customer benefits, or emotional customer benefits, depending what rung of the ladder you climb to.
The recent rebrand of fintech company Wise is a perfect example of a brand that levelled up the benefit ladder to change its story. Wise originally launched in 2011 as TransferWise, and its story highlighted the main feature of its product, which was that it made money transfers between countries cheap, fair and simple.
But over the years its customers’ needs have changed from wanting to send money abroad to wanting to use money, flexibly, in multiple countries. The brand expanded its product offering to meet this need, launching a multi-currency account, a debit card and a business account. But it also needed to change its brand story to accommodate these changing needs.
To do this, it effectively climbed to the top of the benefit ladder to tap into the emotional benefits of its new offering. Dropping ‘Transfer’ from its name, it now tells the story of a brand with a mission to “make your life easier and save you money”. It paints a picture of “money without borders”, where customers have the freedom to conveniently send, spend and withdraw money in multiple currencies, from one account, wherever they are in the world, at the best rates. As part of the rebrand it established a new visual identity to tell its story of going further and offering services to more people so they can send, spend and receive like a local.
Competition: The market has caught up with you
The three Cs teach marketers to position against their competitors, making sure their brand story illustrates how they are different from, or superior to, the competition. But what happens when the market shifts and competitors change their own stories?
This situation is particularly relevant to trailblazing brands that forge their own path with a completely new product offering, and create their own market category. At some point the market will start to catch up, and they’ll need to differentiate themselves from the companies that have followed their lead, learned from their challenges, and produced solutions that solve many of the same problems they do.
Leading adtech brands such as The Trade Desk and Pubmatic understand this situation only too well. As early entrants to the demand-side platform (DSP) and supply-side platform (SSP) categories back in the second half of the noughties, the companies were certainly ahead of the game.
But since that time they have had to continually evolve their stories to survive and compete in a dynamic and cluttered market with multiple participants and leaders, where ongoing innovation, consolidation and integration with different platforms means the landscape is continually changing. Today both are looking to the future. The Trade Desk describes itself as “The omnichannel advertising platform built for the open internet,” while Pubmatic’s story tells how it “maximizes customer value by delivering the programmatic digital marketing supply chain of the future.”
Company: Your product or offering has changed
Developing new product lines or service offerings is a natural part of the evolution of any brand. In fact, many of the world’s most successful businesses have achieved that status by reading their market, predicting future trends, and adapting their core service or offering accordingly. Most people are familiar with the trajectories of brands such as Netflix and Kodak and the impact of innovation (or lack of innovation) on their contrasting fates.
But when a brand makes significant changes to its product or service offering, this may well impact its ability to deliver on the promises it makes with its brand story (the third C). Cue a story overhaul.
With that in mind, some might say a repositioning and a new story was long overdue for B2B innovation and tech company, Nokia. The incredibly strong association of the brand with pre-smartphone handsets (and that oh-so-distinctive ringtone) means it is still widely thought of as a mobile phone company even though it hasn’t produced a mobile device in almost a decade.
Its recent rebranding exercise was – in part – intended to shift those perceptions and dramatically change the story, with Nokia positioning itself as a leader in network evolution to meet the demands of the metaverse era. In the brand’s own words, “We’re claiming our space as a B2B innovation leader pioneering the exponential potential of networks. Networks that have the power to transform the way we all live and work.”
Not sure if your narrative still ticks off all three Cs? Think you might need to change your brand story?
Story evolving is an integral part of our five-step process for building a storyful brand, so drop us a line today and let’s talk about your business and your brand narrative.