How to rejuvenate your brand | 6 repositioning tactics to appeal to the next generation

Are you struggling to engage younger audiences? Are you concerned that your customer base is getting older, and having trouble appealing to the millennial and Gen-Z markets? There’s a strategy for this. It’s called brand rejuvenation.

Most successful, long running businesses find a need for this at some point. They create an exceptional product or service, find their market, serve them well, but then something happens. Either their offering ages with their market, and becomes perceived as too old fashioned to appeal to younger demographics, or competitors and disruptors innovate – either through their marketing or their offering – and the business is put out of step and on the back foot.

Winning brands that stand the test of time will find ways to rejuvenate, reposition, and repurpose their marketing, services, or product ranges to continually appeal to new generations of customers and audiences.

Here are 6 actionable repositioning tactics you can use to appeal to the next generation of your audience or customer base.

1. Understand the demographic you’re targeting

If you don’t understand the demographic you’re targeting, how will you ever be able to appeal to them? The first step needs to be research.

You need to find out:

• What motivates the demographic you’re targeting?
• What is your product or offering to them? (How does it fit in with their culture and their lifestyle?)
• What are your competitors that are appealing to these younger demographics doing differently to you?
• What’s the blocker to them interacting with your organisation? (Is the problem perception and branding? Is the offering still fit for purpose, or are you trading on loyalty and name recognition alone with older demographics?)

This can be achieved by organising focus groups, social media listening, creating and issuing surveys, and good old fashioned competitor analysis.

2. Innovate your product or service to keep up with or disrupt your competitors

Business can all ultimately come down to who’s selling the latest and greatest thing since sliced bread. If your product’s been left in the shade by a game changing feature a competitor has introduced to their latest range, you’re going to be in serious trouble. If a rival is offering an additional service as part of their subscription package and your lack of a similar service is going to be the dealbreaker for clients staying with you, it’ll be the deal-maker for clients going with them.

This tactic should be proactive. Have a road map for your products and services, keep your finger on the pulse of your industry through attending conferences and reading your trade press, invest in research & development, and keep an eye on your competitor’s offerings.

3. Embrace authentic storytelling and polish it with modern production techniques

If your research indicates that your younger target demographic isn’t paying attention to your brand because of perception and branding, you need to rethink how you’re telling your brand’s story.

Millennials and gen-Z are more critical than their predecessors. The digital age, by the sheer volume of information and ease of content creation, has bred cynicism and scepticism – even of the free press. Authenticity, transparency, and substantiated claims are the name of the game when it comes to appealing to younger demographics.

Look at your research on your target demographic, and look at your brand’s story. Does your current communications campaign connect those dots? Does it do it in the right mediums, in a succinct way, and is the end product of an acceptable quality? Could it be improved?

Pro tip: The level of production quality across your podcasts and videos needs to be up to modern standards (it’s never been easier to produce high quality audio visual assets without any professional help), and you need to be creating captivating shorts for use on Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube. These outlets are how you grab mass attention and drive traffic to your strategic pages.

4. Gamify your content to more effectively communicate with younger audiences

Gamification involves using video game elements in your communications, such as challenges, rewards, and competitions, to generate greater user engagement. While gamification is universally effective (who doesn’t like winning?), it is especially useful for reaching younger audiences, who are typically digital natives more versed in gaming tropes, and more susceptible to shorter feedback cycles. Additionally, using gamified experiences as part of your communications, or even as part of an event, can reposition your brand’s identity as being more exciting, dynamic, and cutting edge.

The Drimify gamification platform gives you a range of pre-made game engines which you can customise to suit various purposes, whether that’s Quizzes, branded classic games, puzzles, or even a range of games put together in a multi-level, long form immersive experience that also serves to tell a story.

Because gamified experiences created on Drimify also collect data for every action taken in game, and have the option of adding data collection forms, you can collate valuable insights about your audience’s preferences and behaviours, which can further inform your repositioning efforts.

Pro tip: Longer form gamified storytelling that runs over multiple levels, or even multiple days, can be used to communicate just about any message, and influence just about any user. If your message is complex and nuanced, and not as easy to communicate in soundbites, multi-level gamified storytelling, which can be done intuitively using Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ format, is the way to go.

Since 2003, the concept of newsgames have been experimented with by publishers to provide context to complex situations that can be difficult to adequately explain. This style of game can be a great format for non-profits to use to appeal to younger audiences who are less likely to read pamphlets or long emails, and are stereotypically less well-versed in current affairs.

5. Look to align your brand with influencers in the relevant age bracket you’re targeting

Influencer marketing is a powerful and reasonably established method for brands to connect with younger audiences. Collaborating with influencers who have a following in your targeted demographic can help you gain exposure to your desired audience, help people to see your brand in a more youthful light by association, and give you a cultural seal of approval from a trusted source. Influencers trade on their authenticity within their niche or industry, as their position as a seemingly honest broker is where their value lies.

This can range from sponsored content on their social media platforms, to co-creating content that showcases the value and relevance of your brand to their audience.

For influencer collaborations to work, the partnership needs to feel genuine, and add value to both the influencer’s content and your brand.

6. Stay true to your values: don’t alienate your existing audience, don’t damage your brand equity

When formulating the strategy or road map to reposition your brand to appeal to the next generation, it’s crucial to maintain consistency, and stay true to core values. Part of successfully rejuvenating your brand is not alienating your existing audience or damaging your brand equity.

Your strategy should take a balanced approach that acknowledges the changing needs of younger demographics while respecting the loyalty and preferences of your existing audience or customer base. Any repositioning efforts still need to align with your brand’s identity, purpose, and mission.

While evolving to capture the attention of younger generations, you can’t lose sight of the qualities that made your brand successful in the first place.

Key takeaway

Revitalising your brand to appeal to a younger audience or demographic is by no means an easy thing to do, but ultimately, it’s a challenge every business faces at some point because markets aren’t static, and at any given second, time is moving on – nothing lasts forever.

With that being said, the 6 tactics listed here are actionable across different industries, whether you’re in tech, retail, SaaS, non-profit, or even a branch of government. Start by researching your targeted demographic, and after you’ve managed to draw some conclusions, move on to the most appropriate tactic for your business and take it from there.