Can you share your perspective and best practices for repositioning a mature, market-leading product?

There are many points in a company’s lifecycle when messaging and positioning should be reassessed—such as product launches, rebranding, or when you’re getting consistent feedback from customers or prospects (or other customer-facing teams like sales and support) that things are unclear. Repositioning is often linked to a rebranding moment or major product launch, but not always.For repositioning a mature-market leading company, first be sure to identify the goal. Is it to develop a cohesive ove ...Read More

In many cases when you’re trying to reposition a mature, market-leading product, it’s because 1) you’re either trying to change your target market’s perception of your product / product portfolio or brand relative to the competition. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what we did earlier this year with the rebranding of SurveyMonkey to Momentive. We found through our research that despite the strong aided and unaided brand awareness that we had with SurveyMonkey, the name was becoming very li ...Read More

I really like this question because it's not every day that you're launching a new product. Oftentimes you're making incremental improvements to a product (for example, with several features that add up to something pretty significant). Regardless, you should be frequently revisiting the products you have to ensure they're really resonanting in the market. I've gone through the process of repositioning a product a few times, and I usually encourage people to really start from scratch and have an ...Read More

Good point! I actually find repositioning work to be some of the most fun and rewarding type of product marketing work. With new product launches you often need to work off a lot of assumptions, related research or things you don't know. For repositioning a more mature product, you can work with a lot of what you do know directly. Some of my favorite projects in my career were when I've allowed myself to carve out the time to be the student of my own product. I would study the customer use cases ...Read More

Research, research, research! This is something we embarked on a few years ago for Trello - we had been acquired by Atlassian and over time we needed to cement our place as a mission-critical tool for businesses. We had made our name in the space of being a loveable freemium product that many users got a ton of value out of without paying and it was our job to reposition and repackage our offerings to add enough value to our paid tiers to make them really desirable. We spent a lot of time with i ...Read More

ah yes - that can be tricky! on the one hand you don't want to alienate existing customers (for whom the product and message likely are working) but you also may want to evolve the messaging (perhaps in line with evolving product truth etc.). Product positioning/messaging have to be consistent with the evolving product truth and broader product strategy. The following approach seems to work in these situations:  (1) Involve key customers/a good sample of the customer base in designing the new po ...Read More