Why Brand Repositioning Fails Before It Even Starts

Target keyword: brand repositioning strategy Category: CPG Brand Strategy Estimated read time: 5 min

Beyond Meat just announced it's pivoting to protein drinks.

The CEO, Ethan Brown, called the company "a beverage company in hiding." They've launched a new line called Beyond Immerse, stacked the board with executives from Coca-Cola and Boston Beer, and are now going after the functional beverage market — the same shelf space where Core Power, Muscle Milk, and Premier Protein are all fighting for the same consumer.

I'm not here to say it's the wrong product decision. Honestly, staying in plant-based meat was probably a dead end. The category cooled faster than anyone expected, and the consumer who drove that initial wave moved on. So the pivot makes sense on paper.

What doesn't make sense — or at least, what concerns me — is the sequence.

They changed the product before they changed the brand.

The sequence is everything

There's a pattern I've watched repeat itself in thirty years of working with CPG brands, and it goes something like this: a company hits a wall in its original category, identifies a new opportunity, develops a product, changes the packaging, and then wonders why consumers aren't following them.

The problem is that none of that work touches the thing that actually determines whether a repositioning succeeds: what the brand means to people.

Brand meaning isn't marketing copy. It's the accumulated impression of everything a consumer has ever seen, felt, or assumed about you. And it's surprisingly rigid. You can change your logo, your formulation, your retail channel, your price point — but if the underlying identity doesn't shift, the brand stays where it was in the consumer's mind, even when the product is somewhere new.

Beyond Meat built an identity around a very specific promise. Plant-based. Environmentally conscious. A replacement for meat, not a companion to it. The consumer who bought into that story is not the same person shopping the protein drink cooler at Target. And the person shopping that cooler already has brands they trust — brands whose identity was built around them, from the start.

So Beyond Meat is walking into a category where they're the outsider, carrying identity baggage from a category that's out of fashion, hoping a new product line will do the work that brand strategy needs to do first.

Lululemon tried this. It didn't work the way they hoped.

A few years ago, Lululemon made a genuine push to become a brand for every body — literally. They expanded sizing, changed their messaging, tried to signal inclusion. The intention was good. The product, by most accounts, was fine.

But the brand didn't have permission to go there.

Lululemon had spent years building an identity so specific — the aesthetic, the price point, the aspirational yoga-studio-to-brunch lifestyle — that it was coded in a particular way in people's minds. When they tried to expand that identity, something strange happened: the original customer felt like the brand was drifting away from them, and the new customer didn't feel genuinely invited. The brand was caught between two audiences, and the space between them is where brand equity goes to disappear.

The lesson isn't that Lululemon had bad intentions or even a bad strategy. The lesson is that brand permission has limits, and those limits are set by the consumer — not the brand team. You can't talk your way past them with a campaign. You have to do deeper work upstream.

What "upstream" actually means

When I say upstream, I mean the work that happens before the packaging brief, before the product formulation, before the retail pitch. It's the work of understanding what your brand actually owns in the consumer's mind, what it has permission to do, and where the edges of that permission are.

This is harder than it sounds, because the people closest to a brand are usually the worst judges of its actual meaning in the market. They see the brand from the inside — the strategy documents, the campaign history, the founder's original vision. The consumer sees something much simpler, and much more durable.

A useful question to ask before any repositioning: If this brand disappeared tomorrow, what would consumers say they'd actually miss? The answer to that question tells you what you actually own. Everything else is assumption.

For Beyond Meat, the honest answer might be: consumers would miss the idea of it more than the product. The brand had cultural relevance. It stood for something at a moment when that something mattered. That's actually a real asset — but it's not the same asset as trust in a protein drink. And confusing the two is where repositioning strategies often go wrong.

The repositioning moves that work

The brands that pull off meaningful repositioning typically share a few things.

They acknowledge what they've been, rather than pretending the old identity didn't exist. Consumers have long memories, and brands that try to erase their history tend to lose the trust they'd built without gaining new trust in return.

They find the thread — the underlying value or belief that connects the old position to the new one — and they pull it through everything. The repositioning doesn't feel like a departure; it feels like an evolution. The consumer can follow the logic.

And they do the identity work first. Before the new product line, before the new packaging, before the new campaign, they understand where they're starting from. Not where they wish they were starting from. Where they actually are.

That's the work that most brand teams skip, usually because it's slower and less visible than launching something new. But it's the work that determines whether everything that follows lands or floats away.

Beyond Meat may figure it out. They have smart people, real capital, and a board that knows beverage. But the pivots that succeed aren't the ones with the best product — they're the ones where the brand identity and the new direction are pulling in the same direction from the start.

If you're working through a repositioning and feel like the pieces aren't quite connecting, that's often a signal the upstream work isn't done yet. It's worth slowing down to do it right.

Pato Fuentes is the founder of Gel, a brand strategy and packaging design agency based in Los Angeles. Gel has worked with CPG brands for over 30 years, from pre-launch founders to Fortune 100 companies navigating category shifts and market entry.

FAQ

How do you know when a brand has "permission" to reposition? Permission isn't something a brand grants itself — it comes from how consumers already categorize you. A useful test is to ask consumers what they'd replace your brand with if it disappeared. The substitutes they name tell you a lot about the category they've placed you in and how far they're willing to follow you.

What's the difference between a brand extension and a brand repositioning? An extension adds something new without changing the core identity — a new flavor, a new size, a new category adjacent to the original. A repositioning attempts to change what the brand fundamentally means. Extensions are lower risk because they don't ask the consumer to update their mental model. Repositioning does, and that update doesn't happen automatically just because you change what's on the shelf.

Can a brand recover from a failed repositioning? Sometimes. But it's expensive and slow, and the path back usually requires going back to what the brand actually owned before the repositioning attempt — which can feel like an admission of failure. The brands that recover fastest are the ones that never fully severed the original identity thread and can pick it back up without starting over.

How long does a successful repositioning take? Longer than most brand teams want to hear. Changing brand meaning in the consumer's mind is measured in years, not quarters. The strategic work — defining the new position, building the visual and verbal identity around it, testing that it resonates — can take six months to a year before a single piece of communication goes out. Brands that rush this usually end up repositioning twice.

Is there a good recent example of a brand repositioning that worked? Old Spice is the textbook case — they moved from "my grandfather's cologne" to a self-aware, irreverent men's grooming brand over several years, with identity work and communications that were consistent from the start. More recently, Liquid Death has built a brand identity so specific and so distinct that it has real permission to extend into new categories. Both succeeded because the identity was clear before the expansion happened, not after.

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