Managing Director and Principal at the brand strategy firm Dendro, serving as creative growth partners for ambitious leaders.
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As an Indiana native, I grew up playing lots of basketball. One of the fundamentals of basketball is establishing your pivot foot. Your pivot foot gives you options. You can shoot the ball, drive to the basket, pass the ball or begin your dribble to change positions. This fundamental skill of always being ready to change direction is increasingly valued in business and branding.
What is a brand pivot anyway? Pivoting a brand is a significant shift in strategy to attain new growth. Sometimes it is a direct reaction to marketplace changes, and other times it’s a proactive move to expand and extend the brand in some way.
The pandemic caused lots of brands to pivot because it changed market conditions so drastically. It also released an entrepreneurial revolution, with new business applications skyrocketing. The pandemic was like smelling salts for brand marketers everywhere. If you weren’t pivoting, you were likely exploring it. Here are some questions about when a pivot is necessary and advice on how to execute it.
When should I consider a brand pivot?
Pivots are often reactions to changes. But one real way to gauge if your brand should pivot is its growth. If you’re having trouble growing or scaling, it’s likely time for a pivot. Here are some key indicators of a need to pivot.
• Your brand is playing defense most of the time with no real plan for growth.
• Your brand no longer stands out and is one of many when it used to be unique.
• Your brand is facing a cultural shift affecting how your product or service is being consumed (or not consumed as much).
• Your brand is facing a new generation of consumers who aren’t that into you.
• New entrants in your category are chipping away at your market share by offering new models for buying, consumption, and use.
• Your brand can’t achieve the necessary scale to be effective.
How should I pivot the brand?
Know what you have to overcome.
Understanding the problem is job one. You can’t shift your strategy without it. It could be a competitive problem. It could be a shift in buying habits. It could be technology-focused. Most likely, it is grounded in the innovator’s dilemma: what got you here won’t get you to where you want to go next.
Know where you want to go next.
How will you achieve growth? Making a significant change in strategy has many implications, so truly understanding how you will grow will be important in giving you and your company the confidence that the shift is worth it. It can’t be just based on fear. It has to be based on achievable upside. Some strategies could be:
• Identifying a new audience that needs a different approach than the one your brand is currently taking.
• Exploring a larger brand platform that takes you from solving a specific problem for your audience to solving a larger problem.
• Introducing a new technology or experience that makes your brand easier to do business with.
• Looking at the entire ecosystem that your current brand is a part of and finding a way to broaden your brand’s role in it.
• Seeking relevant adjacencies to your current offering to expand your brand’s impact.
• Launching new brands that enable you to capture a different part of the market or solve a new problem that has been revealed.
• Pioneering a new space where you can identify an emerging need that your brand can meet first.
Know how to make the shift.
This is the tricky part. Understanding what strategic shift to make is only half the battle. Understanding how to get there is a whole different challenge. It usually requires changes not only in marketing and branding but in operations and experience. Here are a few brands that have successfully pivoted.
Netflix: Starting as a mail-order DVD service, Netflix has pivoted many times from downloadable films to streaming films, to a producer of video content to its latest pivot of gaming. Each pivot leveraged/created new consumer behaviors (i.e., binging) and caused the brand to expand its meaning and audiences.
Ro: Initially a website where men get treatment for hair loss and erectile dysfunction, the company pivoted into a tech-driven end-to-end healthcare system with a nationwide provider network, pharmacy distribution centers, telehealth, in-home testing, remote-patient monitoring and more, without the need for insurance.
IBM: Known for so long as Apple’s nemesis in the personal computing space, IBM witnessed the slow death of its core business model. The blue-chip company made a bold move toward IT consulting services for large organizations and introduced the Watson AI platform. The brand is now known for its thought leadership and expertise over hardware.
CVS: After years of being a retail pharmacy that sold cigarettes, CVS pivoted to being big tobacco’s biggest adversary. After ridding its stores of tobacco, CVS acquired Aetna and set out to make personalized healthcare more accessible to everyone.
Pivoting a brand is hard work. It takes equal part courage and strategy. However, the results can be enormous, and most brands that have made a pivot look back and can’t imagine where they would be if they hadn’t. As marketers, we have to stay one step ahead of our competition and three steps ahead of complacency. Knowing where the market is going, understanding the consumer trends, cultural shifts and unmet needs of the market will always be key in knowing when to pivot a brand and where to take it.
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