Brand Positioning: Key Strategies and a Step-by-Step Guide

In the middle of the pyramid are blocks that describe more subjective characteristics: how the company is seen by its employees, its customers, and its competitors, as well as the brand’s communication strategy.

At the top are the essence and the idea: a succinctly expressed brand image that appeals more to the emotional than to the rational side. These are the most concentrated expression of the brand platform.

There is no single standard format for a brand pyramid; the presence and number of blocks are determined by the specifics of each particular case and by the branding objectives of each individual company.

The idea answers the question “What does the brand promise its customer?”, appealing not only to rational benefits but also to emotional associations. The entire further strategy of brand development is built on it.

• BMW. BMW’s goal is to deliver the ultimate driving experience. For more than 100 years, the company has brought innovations in styling and engineering solutions. The group’s brand strategy is to create cars that are not just a means of transportation, but an extension of the driver. BMW combines luxury, top-tier performance characteristics, and revolutionary design so that the driver feels truly comfortable behind the wheel.

• McDonalds. McDonalds’ brand strategy is to be the best fast-food restaurant, offering consistent quality standards and friendly service in thousands of locations worldwide. From classic hamburgers and French fries to seasonal and regional novelties — everyone can find something they like on its menu, and every visit to McDonalds will be pleasant and convenient.

• Yandex. Yandex is a guide to innovation that makes everyday life easier. Its brand strategy is built on creating the image of a reliable assistant that helps cover all the key needs in the digital world—from searching for information to organizing leisure.

• Google. Google gives everyone access to a boundless source of knowledge. Its goal is to organize the vast sea of information, make it useful, and make it universally accessible. Google is something more than just a search engine; it is a catalyst for learning, collaboration, and innovation. The company’s brand strategy is built on the idea of striving to improve users’ lives, enabling them to explore, learn, communicate, and create in a digital space filled with limitless opportunities.

• Amazon. Amazon is a way to make everyday life more convenient. The brand’s development strategy is built on the idea of a store where you can not only find anything, but also receive it with ease. Amazon is not just a platform; it is a reliable guide in the world of online shopping.

• Aeroflot. Aeroflot is the national carrier and the largest airline in Russia. For more than 85 years, it has helped its passengers fulfill their life plans and dreams—work efficiently, relax enjoyably, meet family and loved ones, and discover new countries and cities. The idea underlying the brand platform is to do everything so that passengers feel safe, confident, and comfortable in the sky.

A brand idea must be clear. It does not require precise descriptions of consumer properties, but the buyer should easily grasp what exactly is being promised and what lies at the core of the brand platform.

It must also be customer-centric. The idea indirectly communicates about the company and its values, but its foundation is a description of how the product will be useful to the customer on emotional and rational levels.

A successful brand idea will always feel original. It is important not only to explain what you offer, but also—explicitly or implicitly—to differentiate from competitors (for example, by highlighting in the brand promotion strategy the quality in which you are the leader).

The idea must also be credible. For the brand’s marketing strategy to be effective, the customer must believe that you can deliver on the promise. This can be achieved by referring to objective facts—many years of experience, market coverage, and so on.

Last, but one of the key properties: the idea must be emotionally charged. The goal of the idea is not only to explain how a product or service will solve the customer’s problem, but also to convey the emotions of interacting with the brand. The most successful brand promotion strategies always imply an appeal not only to the rational, but also to the emotional component.

If you have an advantage that can be clearly verified — use it. An example from Amazon’s brand strategy is positioning itself as the platform with the widest selection of goods in the world. Convenience of ordering and delivery also belong to the list of the brand’s key advantages, but when it comes to assortment breadth, Amazon’s leadership is indisputable—it is intuitive and at the same time verifiable.

A less obvious, but still measurable argument is a reference to the brand’s age. Ford has been producing cars for more than 120 years, which makes it one of the pioneers of the automotive industry. At the same time, over its century-long history the brand has not been accompanied only by successes, and its current position can hardly be called leading compared to the beginning of the 20th century. Nevertheless, a reference to its age and the experience and high standards of production processes associated with it is one of the key elements of Ford’s brand platform.

Collaboration with leading players in the industry can also serve as a quite tangible proof of a brand’s high quality. An example from Monochrome’s brand strategy is positioning itself as the only Russian clothing brand that has released collaborative collections with such labels as Pantone, Reebok, Casio G-Shock, and Smashbox.

Reasons to believe can also be more intuitive. For example, GoPro’s slogan —“Be a Hero”— symbolizes the drive to seek adventure that the brand brings into customers’ lives. Even without specific statistics and examples, owning such a camera, GoPro’s brand strategy is built on associations with extreme sports, which transfers a part of this extraordinary experience to the buyer’s self-perception.

A strong outcome in a brand positioning strategy is a situation where a characteristic is endowed with both emotional and rational value at the same time. For example, the bright look of Patagonia trekking backpacks makes them fashionable and more appealing to a young, active audience, but it also has practical value in wilderness conditions.

Regardless of how concrete or abstract a brand’s RTBs are, they must be:

• Logical. Whether it is a reference to measurable data or simply a set of statements — in a brand’s marketing strategy, the reason to believe must be supported by arguments; it cannot be a mere declaration. This is especially important when developing strategies for new brands that have not yet built a stable reputation with the audience.

• Connected to the brand’s identity and positioning. Do not focus on qualities that add no extra value to the message; use only those characteristics and features that work to strengthen the brand strategy and the product’s image.

Brand mission is an idea-driven message about what matters to the company beyond profit.

• Disney — “Make people happy”

• Google — “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

• VkusVill — “Make healthy food for a healthy diet accessible to everyone”

• Airbnb — “Create a world where anyone can belong anywhere”

• Spotify — “Enable millions of artists to share their music and billions of fans to enjoy it”

• HH.ru — “Create advanced technologies on all available platforms so that employers can quickly find the right employee, and job seekers can find a good job”

Brand vision (Brand Vision) answers the question of what the company’s global goal is and what achieving it will look like. In some cases, a brand platform may use another synonymous concept: “the brand’s goal.”

• Disney — “Become the best in producing entertainment content, creating pop-culture images recognizable to everyone”

• Google — “Provide access to any information in the world in one click”

• Detsky Mir — become the national benchmark for a store with the broadest assortment of quality goods for children and teenagers

• Tesla — “Create the leading automotive company of the 21st century by leading the transition to electric vehicles”

• Sber — “Be a convenient ecosystem of services that meets the needs of the modern city resident. Every day, always nearby”

• Lenta — “Become the champion of Russian retail”

Mandatory attributes include:

• Name. Strong naming plays a key role in a brand’s success. For example, the name Google — derived from “googol” (10 to the power of one hundred, 10^100), chosen by the company’s founders as a symbol of the enormous volumes of data accessible through their service — has already become a synonym for searching for information on the Internet. An unsuccessful name, on the other hand, can significantly harm a product. Without well-chosen naming, a brand strategy will not work effectively enough.

• Logo. A memorable logo can be an even more important attribute than the name, complementing it or even replacing it. Classic examples are the Nike and Apple logos, instantly recognizable without additional explanation and having become the foundation of their brand strategy. However, in their original form they were far less successful and took on their iconic appearance only after several redesigns.

• Brand colors and typefaces. Along with the logo, these are an inseparable part of the brand’s visual aesthetics and receive enormous attention when developing a brand strategy. They directly influence both recognition and the tone of advertising messages. A strong visual identity becomes the “calling card” of the product and the brand’s positioning as a whole, merging with it so closely that moving away from it can provoke a painful reaction from customers and even a radical revision of the brand’s marketing strategy. Classic examples of unsuccessful choices in colors and typefaces are the redesign attempts by Gap and Tropicana: the new, more neutral and faceless combinations that replaced the iconic visual style of these brands were so disliked by audiences that the companies were forced to quickly return to the old design.

In addition to the above, a brand strategy may also have the following additional attributes:

• Slogan. A concise, memorable phrase that conveys both a rational and an emotional message can become one of the main components of a product’s success and of the company’s brand strategy as a whole. Unlike a name, which typically consists of adjectives and nouns, a slogan uses verbs that explain how the product works and what changes it can bring into the customer’s life. The lifespan of a successful slogan is 5–7 years, but some remain unchanged for decades and become an integral part of the brand platform: the iconic slogan “Because you’re worth it” was introduced by L’Oréal in 1971, and “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands” by M&M’s — in 1954.

• Mascot. Personalization of the brand’s emotional attributes and associations. Not every product needs its own character, but for some companies it becomes an organic part of the image and brand strategy — or even of the name itself, as with Colonel Sanders or Mr. Proper.

• Musical theme. Standing out from competitors through a memorable jingle is another way to build a brand development strategy. “Ba da ba ba ba, I’m lovin’ it” from McDonald’s, or the upbeat whistling in Old Spice advertising—these sounds are firmly associated with the brand and work to strengthen its identity.

Rational benefits are verifiable characteristics. They may relate both to the product itself (composition, production technologies, price, etc.) and to the manufacturing company (age, market coverage, and market segment).

Emotional benefits are the sensory experience of purchasing a product/receiving a service. A clear connection can be traced between rational and emotional benefits. If rational benefits answer the question “What does the buyer get?”, emotional benefits answer “What do they feel while getting it?”

Successful branding implies a combination of both types of benefits in communication with consumers.

An example of a brand platform in which rational and emotional benefits are well articulated is Spotify. Verifiable (rational) characteristics include an online collection of 100+ million songs, as well as the most technologically advanced personalized recommendation system among streaming services. Emotional benefits include the joy of discovering new music and the pleasure of returning to old favorites thanks to personalized playlists.

When creating the Natura Siberica brand platform, the main rational benefits were the manufacturer’s patented bases. The company was the first to bring natural and organic cosmetics to the Russian market; this claim became the foundation of the brand’s communication strategy. The objective characteristics of the brand’s products are reinforced by an aesthetic of naturalness that refers to the richness of Siberian nature.

Emotional benefits can also be verified, although this is a more labor-intensive process. They can be assessed with a certain degree of reliability through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and the evaluation of specific metrics. As a rule, such deep research is undertaken when the brand platform is already being transformed into a more complex brand strategy.

Analyzing consumption occasions takes into account the product’s competitive advantages—both rational and emotional. These are the foundation on which the brand idea, the brand promise, and the entire brand strategy are formulated.

A consumption occasion can be described in different ways depending on the company’s objectives and the product’s characteristics. The details to be assessed when formulating it are determined by the nature of the product itself and the marketing goals defined during the development of the brand platform. For example, if this is cheese branding, it is worth analyzing:

• Is it a product for morning consumption (a family breakfast) or evening consumption (meeting friends, wine)?

• Is it sold as a whole piece or pre-sliced?

• Who makes the purchase decision?

• What information is important for making the decision (absence of vegetable fats, dried whey, etc.)?

• Who initiates consumption?

• What emotions are associated with it?

The last question is one of the most important. To firmly link the product to specific circumstances, assess what emotions the consumer associates with them. An example of Coca-Cola’s brand strategy is building advertising campaigns around the feeling of joy from drinking their beverage during holidays, family gatherings, parties, and so on. The positive emotions from these social interactions are partially transferred to the drink itself and to the brand’s positioning, forming a stable associative link between a can of cola and the feelings of happiness and fun.

The overall target audience can be divided into two unequal parts:

• Core (primary) — those who already buy similar products, and whose life circumstances are connected to the problems these products solve. The brand strategy is developed primarily for communication with them.

• Peripheral (secondary) — those who are not currently consumers of such products, but may potentially become them. Usually, a brand devotes less attention to them due to their smaller size, but sometimes the brand strategy, on the contrary, implies expanding the core audience by bringing in new people from the peripheral segment.

For example, Converse’s core target audience originally consisted only of professional athletes, and the entire brand platform was built for them. Over time, it began to include non-professional basketball players as well. With the emergence of strong competitors such as Nike, Puma, and Adidas, the portrait of Converse buyers changed even more — the shoes became an everyday item and gained popularity among musical subcultures, and “counterculturalness” became an integral part of the brand strategy.

When defining the target audience, both socio-demographic and value indicators are analyzed. The former include:

• Gender and age

• Place of residence

• Profession and income level

• Marital status

• Education

Building brand positioning based on socio-demographic characteristics is relatively straightforward, because the data is easy to verify and targeting methods are obvious (this is most clearly seen in the example of contextual advertising in social media).

Value indicators are harder to identify. They are partly related to socio-demographics, but can also be inherent in other groups. They are used to potentially expand the target audience or when the brand platform needs to be radically updated. These include:

• Hobbies and interests

• Values

• Role models

• Hidden motives

Tools for audience analysis can be direct (surveys, focus groups, interviews) — i.e., involving direct communication with potential buyers — or indirect (search analytics, analysis of posts in blogs and social networks). Clear target-audience targeting in branding makes it possible not only to increase sales, but also to build a more meaningful dialogue with customers, which helps create clearer brand positioning and will affect audience loyalty in the future.

An example of a clear brand positioning strategy that has been working for more than half a century is Volvo. Since the late 1950s–early 1960s, Volvo has consistently promoted its cars as the safest on the market.

The rational advantages on which the brand platform was built were technological innovations: it was Volvo engineers who invented a reliable seat belt design and a child car seat, which became a new standard for the automotive industry and have not fundamentally changed since. Exceptional durability of the cars in crash tests also became one of the pillars on which Volvo’s brand positioning was built.

These rational arguments were reinforced by a corresponding emotional message — Volvo was positioned as a family car to which you can entrust the life and health of your closest people.

To promote such a narrative, Volvo’s brand strategy implies the use of calm, neutral colors and minimalist typography in marketing materials, emphasizing the brand’s Scandinavian roots and focusing on simplicity, elegance, and functionality. Having found a successful positioning strategy, Volvo has adhered to it for more than 60 years.

Another example of a consistent brand positioning strategy that allowed a company to compete with the market leader is Pepsi. Until the 1950s, Pepsi’s brand positioning did not differ much from its main rival — Coca-Cola. But in the second half of the decade, the company’s branding began to change: in contrast to a competitor that embodied stability and family values, Pepsi’s brand strategy implied creating the image of a drink for a young, progressive generation.

The social upheavals of the 1960s in the USA and Western European countries were also used differently by the brands: while Coca-Cola’s brand positioning was a way to take a break from constant change through a classic taste that had remained unchanged for decades, Pepsi’s brand positioning was the spirit of a new era and a new “Pepsi generation” that came with it.

The updated brand strategy was reflected both in visual aesthetics and in the character of communication with customers. By adding a new color — blue — to its identity and removing the word “Cola” from its name, Pepsi made its design more aligned with the spirit of the new time and more distinct from its main competitor.

The face of the brand also changed — the company began promoting the drink through collaborations with music and film stars popular among young audiences. This brand strategy, with minor changes, has been used in Pepsi’s branding for more than half a century, allowing the brand to remain relevant and compete with Coca-Cola with a similar set of consumer characteristics.

Evaluate the pros and cons of the product and the company as a whole, and assign them to these four fields. Treat advantages and disadvantages as internal factors — those related to the product itself — and opportunities and threats as external factors, driven by the state of the market, competitors’ positions, and so on. Brand positioning will be built based on these.

SWOT analysis is a universal tool: it can be used to evaluate any brand — not only a company, but, for example, the brand of a city or a non-profit organization. This matrix makes it possible to see a company’s strengths and issues in a concise and clear form and to create a brand platform. It simplifies the selection of strengths on which the development of a brand strategy will be based, or, if such strengths do not yet exist, it helps outline ways to develop them.

At the initial stage, a brand strategy can, as a rule, be built on a simple quantitative analysis — that is, by listing factors and placing them into the matrix sectors. Later, a more complex analysis — qualitative or correlational — can be conducted to examine each of the identified points in more detail and to study competitors’ branding.

• Positioning by attribute. The most basic and widespread strategy. The unique selling proposition of a product or service is communicated by focusing on one of its attributes. This attribute may relate to either rational or emotional characteristics of the product. An example of a brand strategy using this approach is the updated image of Sber. Sberbank retained its classic slogan “Sber. Always nearby!” after a large-scale rebrand. With the launch of a digital ecosystem, the slogan gained a new context (instead of a wide network of bank branches, it now appeals to a set of different services—from streaming and grocery delivery to insurance and cloud solutions), but the key message on which the brand platform is built does not change. Sber aims to be present everywhere and always be accessible to its customers.

• Positioning by benefit. The main focus is on a problem faced by potential buyers and on how the product solves it. Brands of medicines and household chemicals often use this strategy for promotion. When developing brand positioning, the most important work is with consumer insights. An example of a brand platform using this approach is Volvo, which emphasizes maximum driver safety in its positioning. Another brand platform built in a similar way is Nike, where the buyer is communicated an emotional benefit from self-overcoming and a sense of belonging to sport.

The strategies of positioning by attribute and by benefit are similar — in both cases, they are based on the core, essential characteristics of the product. In the first case, the brand’s advantage is only declared; in the second, it is explicitly presented as a solution to a typical problem of the brand’s target audience. Both strategies are not very effective in markets with a high level of competition (because any advantages are copied relatively quickly), so successful brand positioning should combine several approaches at once.

• Positioning against competitors. This strategy involves direct comparison with competitors and differentiation through opposition. The brand offers a new way to solve customers’ problems, or simply does the same thing as competitors, but better. As a rule, this brand strategy is used to enter or expand in a market where there is already a monopolist or a narrow group of strong players. Here one can recall the classic confrontation between Apple and IBM, or Tele2’s attempt to push aside the three giants of mobile communications in the mid-2000s.

• Positioning by category. This approach focuses on the brand’s leadership within a particular product category. This leadership is achieved either through overall superiority in the standard characteristics for the category, or through innovations that offer a radically new experience. Brands that choose a category-based positioning strategy often become household names. Examples of brand platforms built on this principle include Xerox, Coca-Cola, Google, Thermos, and others.

Positioning against competitors and positioning by category also have much in common — in both cases, the emphasis is on differentiating from similar brands. The first strategy works for those who aim to displace the market leader (without necessarily taking its place). It is often used when developing strategies for new brands. The second suits those who already hold leadership positions or are confident they can quickly achieve and then maintain leadership in the long term.

• Positioning by audience. The main focus of this strategy is a specific target group of buyers. Audience segmentation can be based on age, gender, income, profession, or other parameters. The goal is to make the brand an integral symbol of belonging to this group and to build the entire brand platform on association with it. For example, in the electric guitar market there are at least a dozen major players, but if you are a guitarist it is practically impossible not to encounter the Fender brand — a pioneer of the industry and the default choice for most musicians. Another example of positioning by audience is Tochka Bank, created for entrepreneurs, oriented toward the needs of small businesses and individual entrepreneurs, and offering additional services that make their activities easier—online accounting, support for tenders, and so on. In the United States, a similar brand strategy is used by Stripe—it presents itself as a bank for web designers, startup founders, and all those who need a payment solution for a website or an application.

• Positioning by usage situation. The goal of this strategy is to create a strong associative link between the brand and a specific situation in which it is used. An example of brand positioning in this way is the GoPro action camera. It does not matter whether it is used in extreme sports competitions, in a travel blog, or to film individual scenes in a movie — it will always be the first-choice brand in its segment.

Positioning by audience and positioning by usage situation also share many similarities — both start not from a property of the product itself. For the first, branding will mainly be based on the characteristics of the target audience (which makes the potential audience narrower). For the second, it is based on the circumstances of the situation in which the product is used (which creates potential for audience expansion). There are relatively few people who play guitar, but they are a community with fairly stable consumer habits. There are far more buyers of laundry detergent, but there are also many subgroups within that audience.

• Positioning by price-to-quality ratio. In this strategy, the product is positioned as the optimal set of characteristics within the stated price segment. As a rule, the strategy uses the model “a high-quality (though clearly not premium) product at a price lower than one might expect.” But it also works for luxury brands. A classic example of a brand strategy is IKEA, which has become synonymous with the combination of concise Scandinavian design, decent build quality, and low prices. Azbuka Vkusa has a different positioning — this supermarket chain promises customers a significantly more refined assortment and fresher products at prices slightly above the market average.

As with archetypes, most brands combine several positioning strategies at once in different proportions.

A brand platform makes it possible to get acquainted with a company, the aesthetic of its products, and its fundamental values, and to understand the essence of the brand. A brand platform should take into account the company’s market position and its intended marketing strategy, but in the platform itself these are generally not described in detail. While a brand strategy is intended to examine the subject from all sides, the brand platform primarily speaks about meaning and identity. As a rule, a brand platform is designed as a brand book or a set of guidelines that in detail describe the principles of branding.

Structurally, a brand platform resembles a pyramid to some extent. There is no single format, but there is a set of categories that it typically includes.

First and foremost, the platform reflects the brand’s essence — a brief description of the brand’s core idea and its essence, formulated in one, maximum two phrases. Within a brand platform, it can be presented in the form of a slogan and supplemented with visual references.

The platform reflects the brand’s attributes. This includes information about the brand’s visual markers, as well as its tone of voice. The goal of a brand platform is to bring all elements of the visual identity together into a single concise document that lets you, at a glance, feel the company’s visual style and its semantic charge.

Usually, a brand platform focuses precisely on the meaning embedded in the logo, typefaces, brand colors, and other branding elements, without paying special attention to layout rules and other technical details.

A company’s tone of voice is described in the brand platform both through the vocabulary used in advertising and through information about the planned types of communication, advertising placement contexts, and so on.

The platform also incorporates the brand’s values — a set of ideas and principles that the company follows when interacting with customers and building internal processes. A brand platform is designed to clearly record the practices that have developed within the company so that later all its departments — from marketing to customer support — can align their activities with them and maintain the chosen development vector.

Also, the brand platform and the values reflected in it can serve as a kind of declaration of intent if a company has gone through a rebrand and intends to change the principles of how it operates.

The platform reflects the brand’s vision: it records not only the current but also the desired position of the company, and it describes its idea of success and the paths by which it intends to achieve it. Quite often, a brand platform is used to mark an updated development path for a company, outlined after repositioning or rebranding.

The platform specifies the brand’s character — a list of emotional characteristics inherent in the brand and its products. As a rule, a brand platform reveals it through several parameters. First, it describes the brand archetype. In the case of a more complex image, the brand platform may contain information about several archetypes at once, used to different degrees in shaping the brand’s style, its visual and meaning content. Second, character manifests through the ideal image of the buyer. The brand platform describes several target audience segments, each of which corresponds to a certain image connected to the brand’s character.

A brand platform is a universal document that allows you to quickly get acquainted with a brand and understand its essence. It speaks not so much about the factual characteristics of the product (though partly that as well), but about the emotions the brand communicates.

In practice, a brand platform is a kind of memo for everyone who is, in one way or another, involved in the company’s work. As already mentioned, it is useful during rebranding — but not only: it is also useful when scaling a business, entering new markets, or moving into new fields of activity. A brand platform helps a company remain true to its principles and aesthetic, keeping brand positioning and the advertising message clear.

The platform also makes it possible to coordinate all advertising activities with the company’s overall operating principles: the brand platform serves as a reference point both for the marketing and design departments and, for example, for the HR department.

• Initially insufficient work with the brand. This situation is typical of a growing small business. At the initial stage, a company may launch without developing a brand strategy and even achieve limited success, but later a well-designed brand strategy becomes a necessary condition for attracting new customers and strengthening loyalty to the product.

• A blurred message. Also, in small businesses the brand strategy is often developed in-house, and as a result it turns out to be insufficiently cohesive. The brand message becomes unclear, or there are too many messages being communicated, which pushes customers toward competitors with a well-built image. Despite seeming simple, developing a brand strategy is a long and labor-intensive process with many nuances, which is better entrusted to professionals.

• The appearance of new products in the line. As the company develops, it launches new products, and the original brand positioning may not take into account their characteristics and image. If there are many such products, the very essence of the brand will begin to change, which will also require adjustments to the strategy.

• Changes in the company’s structure and its operating principles. Internal processes in the company can also affect brand positioning. A startup that has grown into a large firm, or an industry leader that has decided to add a new line of business to its portfolio, will be perceived differently by the audience. The brand strategy must also reflect these changes.

• Reaching a new audience. For one reason or another, the customer profile has changed—old customers have grown up, developed new habits, and so on. Or perhaps the familiar audience has not gone anywhere, but the growth limit within it has already been reached and new markets must be sought, which requires making adjustments to the brand strategy.

• A decline in sales. From time to time, even high-quality products with a long history reach stagnation or even a drop in sales. If the product’s consumer characteristics are not the reason, the culprit may be an outdated marketing image that fails to communicate all the brand’s advantages to the audience. Developing brand positioning implies relying on the product’s existing ideological heritage, but sometimes it is better to partially or completely abandon it.

• The emergence of new competitors. Developing brand positioning for a specific market situation will not make sense if the balance of power in the industry changes—new players may encroach on your niche, and former non-competitors, having changed their own positioning, may become competitors.

For the same reasons, but in cases where updating the brand positioning strategy is not enough, more comprehensive work is carried out—rebranding. Rebranding involves a complete change in both the semantic and the visual components of the product; that is, in addition to repositioning, a restyling or redesign is carried out—changing typefaces, brand colors, the logo, and so on.

As a rule, a brand’s visuals are updated more often than its essence. Outside the professional environment, rebranding is often understood as work specifically with just one of the brand’s components (so-called partial rebranding).