Should you be zigging if your customers want to keep zagging?

I’ve been thinking alot about brand repositioning recently. 

Its all very well deciding that from now on your brand is going to be aimed at Audience X, but what about all the Audience Ys that have been faithfully interacting with your brand?  They might not be the most profitable or have the best long term prospects, but the old saying ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’ springs to mind.

I keep seeing brands repositioning, retargeting and rebranding, without much thought towards how their existing customer base might react – or (worse) trying to get those existing customers to start using the brand for a different occasion or in a different way without really communciating the reasons behind the change to them – ‘if we change it, they will still come’.

Sometimes maybe its better to create a new brand than to force an old brand and its customers into a new business model.

This pic (from howstrange) doesn’t have that much to do with repositioning, but I love it too much not to share…