Need to turn a business around? Businesses can get in trouble for so many reasons: whatever the case, you need a strategy. Have you considered looking at your brand?

Running a business is not for the faint-hearted: even once you manage to launch it and even make it profitable, there is so much that can happen in the short and medium term. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 25% of businesses manage to live past 10 years, with the great majority failing long before that.

Failure can be due to various problems in the business model and market fit or to sudden changes in the environment like new entrants, changing technology, or shifts in culture.

All these circumstances demand the ability to react swiftly and turn a business around before it’s too late.

While most turnaround strategies will be centered on business fundamentals, branding can be an important part of the equation.

Understand the brand is tightly linked to the business

In order to turn a business around with branding, we must first recognize that a brand is linked to the business itself and not just to its communication. A reductive vision of the brand, equaling it to the visual identity, will prevent you from using it as a business tool.

Of course, a brand is much more than that. A good brand strategy assumes a deep knowledge of the audience, the market, and the cultural forces in action, and of course it is impossible without a solid understanding of why our business is supposed to succeed. It provides – in other terms – a broad vision of the business.

When a business is in dire straits, sometimes the brand can play a relevant role in finding a way to safety and even success.

Turn a business around by reviewing your brand positioning

Markets change all the time, even if your brand hasn’t. New competitors enter the arena, existing competitors change their positioning, and customers change their preferences.

This impacts the meaning and relevance of your brand and products, sometimes without you noticing until it’s too late.

In other terms, the positioning that has served your brand well so far might not be working anymore. A crisis (or even better, the moments that precede a full-fledged crisis) is a good time to reassess what you took for granted and devise a new positioning.

A leader brand might try to reinvent itself as a challenger, a conscious brand might want to highlight its promise of status.

This might help you turn a business around by giving the audience new reference points but also by helping you realign internally.