People change. It’s one of the few guarantees in life. As time moves on and cultures evolve, people’s opinions, needs, and preferences evolve too.
For businesses, this means that if you want to survive, you have to evolve along with them. You need to be ready to grow with your customers to continue serving their needs, no matter how they change. Small changes are easy enough to adapt to. Your customers start expressing they’d like a new feature in one of your products, and you update it to meet their needs. Maybe you develop a new product and introduce them to something they didn’t even know they wanted.
But sometimes the change in your customer base is bigger. Something a new product or service can’t solve. In this case, it might be time for a repositioning.
Repositioning involves altering your company’s identity, market perception, and offerings to better meet the needs and expectations of your customers. A full repositioning can be driven by various factors such as changes in consumer preferences, new emerging technologies, shifts in industry dynamics, or even unforeseen global events (like a pandemic). It can also be driven by internal factors, such as recent negative publicity requiring you to change your brand’s perception in the world. Even strategic growth, allowing you to expand the market’s understanding of your company so you can explore new segments.
Clearly, repositioning is a great way for your organization to stay fresh and relevant in the minds of your customers. That’s why every company is always so excited to do it!
Right?
But repositioning is hard.
There’s a reason many organizations put off repositioning for as long as they can. For one, it’s often incredibly time consuming. Between customer research, strategy development, roadmapping implementation, and about a million other things, a successful repositioning can seem like more work than it’s worth. Additionally, each of these steps costs money, the return on which can often be difficult to quantify. This can make it hard to justify an effort to the decision makers higher up.
In the end, while many organizations like to talk about the importance of quickly responding to changes in the market, the realities of doing so are often a deterrent to large organizations. Especially those who are attached to doing things a “certain way.”
But repositioning doesn’t have to be time consuming, expensive, and difficult to justify. No matter how complex your organization, you can reposition yourself in the market in a way that is fast, cost effective, and customer centric. You just need to take an agile approach.
The Agile Advantage
By now, we’re all sick of hearing the word “agile.” It’s thrown around so much in the business strategy and development world that it’s just about lost all meaning. But “agile methodology” comes from software development, and it does have an actual definition—beyond just moving quickly. It’s characterized by collaboration, adaptability, and customer centricity. The agile framework is an iterative methodology made up of rapid prototyping and short development sprints. These allow you to quickly pilot and test ideas, then collect feedback and refine until you end up with something that works.
A primary cornerstone of agile methodology is customer feedback. It’s easy to believe that your internal teams know what’s best for your customers. They’re your experts, after all. That’s what you pay them for. But this fails for two reasons. The first is that only your customers really know what they want. But there is a second (and less obvious) reason.
It may seem like gathering customer feedback is going to make your process take longer. But in fact, using customer voices to guide your repositioning actually streamlines the process. When it’s up to your internal teams, you can get stuck in months and months of opinions and speculation while your teams’ strongest personalities butt heads about what they think is right. When you lean on the data gathered from your customers, you cut out all that swirl. There’s no arguing with the data.
7 Steps of an Agile Repositioning
Ok, so now that we know what an agile process actually is, how can we use it for repositioning? As we mentioned, agile methodology was first created for software development—but that doesn’t mean it can’t apply to any development.
How do we know? Because we used it for our own repositioning.
Thoughtform has been around for more than 40 years. Since then, the world of design has evolved drastically. From doing graphics for signs and brochures to roadmaps for strategic initiatives, we’ve seen it all.
But in 2020, the world changed in a new way. Mounting market pressures required many of our customers to whittle down their operations to the bare essentials and focus on what mattered most. Many of them were in a place where they needed less documentation support and more future visioning strategy. So, instead of doubling down on how we’d done things in the past, we used an agile process to develop a new positioning. We brought our teams together, spoke with our customers, convened brainstorming sessions, and came up with a new approach that better articulated how our unique skills fit with our customer’s emerging needs. As a result, we’re now our customers’ go-to partners for strategy development and organizational transformation.
So how does it work? Remember, agile development is an iterative process. Follow these steps—and then repeat as necessary.
- Analyze: Begin by understanding the forces that are driving your repositioning. Identify key market trends, emerging opportunities, and customer behaviors that have indicated it’s time for you to change. Then, conduct your customer research to gain insights into your customers’ changing preferences and unmet needs. You can use surveys and other mass feedback-gathering tools if you’d like. But there’s really no replacement for good old fashioned, one-on-one conversation.
- Ideate: Gather your internal team together and facilitate brainstorming sessions to generate ideas for the new positioning. In this case, you’ll want to include representatives from each of your necessary teams, including marketing, business development, and other customer-facing departments. In addition to SVPs and Directors, be sure to include some of your boots-on-the-ground. No one knows what your customers need better than them. Once you have your concepts generated, prioritize them for strategic fit, market potential, and feasibility, until one rises to the top.
- Prototype: With your direction identified, rapidly develop your “prototype” positioning. Be sure to include elements such as your unique value proposition, target audience, market category, and key benefits. Don’t be too precious about what you create. You will refine it further in future steps.
- Collect feedback: Once you have your prototype, it’s time to validate it. Solicit feedback from a select group of target customers through surveys, focus groups, or beta testing. You want to know how the new positioning situates you in their minds. How does it evolve what they previously thought of you? What kind of services would they now trust you with based on this positioning? Does that align with your goals? Analyze the feedback to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. Then, iterate on the prototype, making incremental adjustments to refine the repositioning strategy.
- Implement: Now that your positioning is refined, it’s time to introduce it to the world. Develop a comprehensive implementation plan that outlines key milestones, timelines, resource requirements, and marketing campaigns to communicate the repositioning with target audiences. Then, execute your strategy in phases, closely monitoring performance metrics and adjusting tactics as needed. Remember to set your own KPIs to measure success (it’ll come in handy later).
- Iterate: But you’re not done yet! Now’s the time to keep your ear to the ground, monitoring market dynamics and customer feedback to gauge the response. Collect data to measure against your KPIs and evaluate the effectiveness of the repositioning strategy. Then iterate on the strategy based on real-world results, making data-driven decisions to optimize outcomes.
- Repeat: Then just repeat the process until the feedback you’re receiving from your customers and the market indicates that you’re now meeting the needs you identified in your initial phases.
Agile repositioning offers a streamlined and iterative approach to adapting to market changes. It allows you to innovate, experiment, and evolve your strategy in real-time. By embracing agility and customer-centricity, your organization can successfully reposition itself to thrive in an ever-evolving marketplace.
But what about you? Are your customers moving on without you? If you’re ready to take an agile approach and reposition with purpose, we’d be happy to chat. Just shoot an email to our Principal Steve Frank at [email protected] and we’ll get back to you ASAP.