Have you noticed how many consumer brands are trying to redefine themselves? It’d difficult to reposition an old brand in consumers’ minds.

In the last frew months, many are redefining their brand positioning from quality or convenience into price. Kind of following the recession trend I guess. They focus with a weekly or monthly estimate multiplied by 12. “just switch to our brand and save 15.50 a week- that’s over $800 a year.!

Hyundai just came out with an ad campaign where they will take the car back if you lose your job. Very creative use of recession-proofing the purchase. Overcoming objections!

McDonald’s has been trying to reposition their brand as more healthy for a while — especially since the supersize movie came out. Robyn McMaster at Brain Based Biz recently visited them to rediscover their brand and see if the products really merited the new positioning. 1/17/09 Update: This BusinessWeek story about the McDonald’s Makeover sheds some light onto their rebranding and new marketing position with a global redesign of the packaging. I find it interesting how they try to balance the green initiatives, obesity concerns, local grown ingredients, fast convenience food, low cost, global language constraints, and the whole friendly thing. When you consider all the constraints it is a wonder the brand isn’t in psychotherapy!
FedEx Kinko’s just relaunched their joint branding and now is re launching again as just FedExOffice. Good bye Kinko’s!

So what is the balance between brand equity, all the repositioning dollars and just plain old starting from scratch?

Are you rebranding your business in 2009? Even without realizing it - by abandoning your service and quality positioning in favor of low price positioning?