Words: Adam Ketterer – Founder
Category(s): Branding, Positioning
Date: 28th April 2025
You really don’t want to be taking B2B brand strategy decisions lightly.
By definition, any choices you make about your brand strategy are long-term decisions. These choices aren’t forever but, realistically, it takes years to build a brand that establishes the right associations in the minds of your prospects. It just doesn’t happen in a couple of quarters, even if that’s what we’d like to believe in this modern era of performance-obsessed marketing.
So if you’re thinking about your positioning, it’s worth thinking about whether right now is the right time to pull the trigger. Because you better believe that there are wrong times.
Here are five good times, and five very bad times, to change your brand positioning…
5 good times to reposition your B2B brand
1. When you’ve just been acquired.
Let’s start with an easy one: post-acquisition. If your business has just been bought by another business or taken private, you probably do need to take stock of your new direction and reflect any meaningful changes in your brand strategy.
This isn’t always necessary. (A lot of recently acquired businesses insist nothing is going to change, and some of them aren’t lying!) But it is helpful to reframe your narrative if all the press you’re going to get for the next six months is about how much things have changed.
2. When the market has shifted.
Markets are ruthlessly dynamic. They don’t sit around waiting for the incumbents to change the game if it isn’t in their best interests to do so. All too often, the game changes faster than the incumbent can adapt.
When this happens, you can either deliberately reposition your brand for the new reality in the market or let the market decide your new position for you. (The second option is bad.)
3. When you’re ready for a bigger market.
If you’re following the Crossing the Chasm field manual, you’ll know you want to establish yourself as a big fish in a little pond before hopping over to start competing with the other big fish. When this moment comes, you need to reposition.
An all-too-common trend in B2B is for brands to just keep making their stories vaguer and vaguer the more solutions they add to their portfolio. The smarter move is to take the time to take stock and think clearly about the bigger market you’re trying to enter. Then craft a specific position within it.
4. When everyone disagrees about what you are.
If your product team and your sales team and your CEO and your market all describe your business in different ways, it’s a good time to hit the brakes and sort out your definitive positioning. Arguably the most valuable part of a positioning process is having an agency sit everyone down to share their thoughts and get on the same page.
Inertia is a powerful thing so businesses can stay in this unholy mess of passive disagreement for years before they do anything about it. But if you had to choose between ripping the band-aids off and dying a slow, squirmy death, well, we’ll leave that one to you.
5. When your story and strategy have drifted apart.
It would be nice if marketing was always operating in lock-step with the rest of the enterprise but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes the story you’re telling doesn’t exactly rhyme with the roadmap you’re building towards.
For instance, tricky situations like the innovator’s dilemma tend to sneak up on you. What seems like a cool new product sometimes turns out to be the entire future the enterprise is betting on two years later. If your story hasn’t kept pace with reality, it’s a good time to revisit your positioning and close the strategy-story gap.
5 bad times to reposition your B2B brand
1. When you’ve got a new CMO.
Okay this is a tricky one. Agencies get excited when a new CMO takes over because they usually want to change everything – which can be good for the agency’s revenue forecast. But dismantling a perfectly effective brand for the sake of it is not sensible.
If repositioning your business means changing a logo that everyone recognizes, or changing a story that the market was invested in, don’t do it. Don’t throw the brand equity out with the bath water.
2. When you’re bored.
If you’ve been saying the same thing over and over again for years and years…you’re doing highly effective brand marketing. Seriously. The frequency with which messages need to be repeated for brands to be built can be mind-numbing to those of us building the brand.
This is, however, not a good reason to change things up. If the price of building your brand is a few yawns in the marketing team it’s a price worth paying. Find new ways to say the same thing, try new tactics, do a big goofy brainstorm for new activations. Just don’t break the thing you’ve spent so long trying to build because the people most exposed to it fancy a change.
3. When you’re launching a new product.
Marketing can be a real cesspool for jargon, so forgive our pedantry here. A new product is not a new positioning. It’s just a new product. Even if it’s a super exciting new product or some big revamp, it isn’t a good reason to rethink the fundamentals of your position in the market.
A repositioning should be reserved for the rare moments you are selling to a new market, going up against new competitive alternatives and bringing a new differentiating value to bear. Anything else is just a sparkling campaign.
4. When you’re just about to IPO.
Another slightly controversial one, maybe, but hear us out. If you’re IPOing (not that anyone is any more) so you can target a different market with a different offering, fine yes, go nuts, reposition your brand. (Also, you know, let’s talk, etc.)
But if you’re IPOing to do what you’ve already been doing just at a bigger scale, don’t reverse all the good decisions that got you this far. Maybe you neglected marketing and you want some nicer graphics to hang outside the NYSE before the big day. Just make sure all the attention you’re about to get adds to your existing reputation.
5. When you’re in a hurry.
Repositioning your B2B brand strategy is a big call that you will live with for many years to come. Do not attempt to do it if you haven’t got your ducks in a row but need something to go live for some event in a couple of weeks.
Think of it this way: would you rather do one event with a less-than-ideal brand or pay yet another agency to do another repositioning when every sales person complains about marketing for the next six months?
Bonus bad time to do a repositioning…
When your CEO’s not on board.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Positioning is too important to be marketing’s job. If your CEO isn’t driving the repositioning effort, all you’re doing is making decks. If the CEO is driving the effort, you’re making decisions.
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Still not sure if now’s the right time to reposition your business? Let’s hop on a call.