When Pivots Go Right (and Very, Very Wrong)

If you’ve been in business since 2020, congratulations, you’ve survived one of the biggest global behaviour shifts in modern history. Covid didn’t just disrupt us. It rewired consumer expectations. It reshaped spending. It redefined loyalty.

And five years later, in 2025, we’re still not “back to normal”, and I don’t think we ever will be. We’re in a completely different economy, where 82% of consumers are more price-conscious, 68% have already switched brand loyalties, and 71% expect businesses to adapt quickly, or they’ll walk straight to your competitor.

Welcome to the Great Post-Covid Pivot. Some brands adapted beautifully. Some… well… face-planted into the pavement.

This article has been written to prove one thing….

Let’s break down who nailed their pivot with strategic precision and who tried to reinvent themselves so hard they forgot who the bloody hell they were.

Firstly, The Pivots That Worked

These are the brands that pivoted strategically, building on their identity instead of abandoning it.

1. NETFLIX - A Masterclass in Adapting to the Data

Netflix didn’t pivot for creativity; they pivoted because the market forced them to. It was a case of survival, and they simply rebuilt their business model around actual user behaviour.

Why They Had to Pivot:
Here’s what was happening:

• Subscriber growth declined for the first time ever

• 100+ million households watching for free through password sharing

• New heavyweight competitors: Disney+, HBO Max, Prime, Apple TV+

• Content production costs skyrocketed post-Covid

• Investors demanded profit, not “growth at any cost”

• Consumers slashed subscription spending during inflation

They either evolved the business model… or risked becoming the next Blockbuster.

What They Did:

✔ Introduced an ad-supported tier (first in company history)
✔ Cracked down on password sharing
✔ Rebalanced content investment toward global hits
✔ Optimised pricing across regions
✔ Shifted to operational efficiency and profitability

The Results:

• 22 million new subscribers added in 12 months

• 40% of new sign-ups are now ad-tier

• 55% of top titles are international (data-led content strategy)

• Revenue up 12% YoY

Key Takeaway for Any Business

If the market changes, you don’t always have to change who you are, sometimes, the simplest pivots are about changing how you deliver it. Protect your core offering, but be willing to reinvent the pricing, structure, delivery and revenue model around it. When growth slows, audit your model first always, not your brand in a panic. Fix the leaks - your pricing, tiers, retention, upsells, customer journey, before you ever consider changing the identity that people already trust.

2. McDONALD’S — The Value Comeback

McDonald’s didn’t get lost in the “premium” food trend. They remembered who they serve; everyday households feeling the squeeze. They doubled down on value, loyalty and convenience exactly what their audience wanted in an inflationary economy.

Why They Had to Pivot:

Post-Covid inflation hit their core audience hard:

• Consumers pulled back on takeaway spending

• Households shifted to home cooking

• Rising ingredients + labour costs hit franchise margins

• Younger audiences demanded digital-first experiences

• Delivery competitors (UberEats, DoorDash) ate up share

McDonald’s had to stabilise relevance and profitability.

What They Did:

✔ Relaunched value menus
✔ Introduced $5 bundles
✔ Expanded and gamified their loyalty program
✔ Rolled out CosMc’s beverage-focused concept
✔ Drove orders through app + delivery ecosystem

The Results:

• 10% global revenue growth

• $9 billion per quarter in digital sales

• 150 million active loyalty users

• Foot traffic up 19% with value bundle promos

Key Takeaway for Any Business:

When customers tighten their wallets, don’t reinvent yourself, double down on the value you’re famous for. Strip your offer back to what people rely on you for, make it easier to buy, easier to access and harder to walk away from. In tough economies, the brands that win aren’t the fanciest, they’re the ones who deliver undeniable value, consistently, without overcomplicating the experience.

3. QANTAS — The Reputation Reset

Qantas went through a badly needed reset after years of public frustration. And to their credit, they didn’t pivot around the issue. They pivoted into it. They addressed trust, leadership and service, ya know, the stuff Australians were genuinely angry about, instead of plastering over it. If only our Government could do the same hey!

Why They Had to Pivot:

Qantas wasn’t suffering from a marketing problem, it was suffering from a trust problem.

• On-time performance crashed to ~60%

• Customer complaints dominated headlines

• Loyalty members openly revolted

• Public trust ratings hit record lows

• Regulatory scrutiny increased

• New CEO stepped in with pressure to clean house

A brand can’t survive without trust, and Qantas had lost theirs.

What They Did:

✔ New leadership
✔ Massive customer experience reinvestment
✔ Accountability commitments
✔ Fix-first operational strategy
✔ Public transparency around service upgrades

The Results:

• Customer satisfaction up 23%

• On-time performance from 60% → 74%

• NPS up 12 points

• $230 million invested in customer improvements

Key Takeaway for Any Business:

You can’t rebrand your way out of a trust crisis, you fix it by listening to your customers, acknowledging their complaints openly and publicly stating how you’re going to repair the damage. When trust breaks, the only winning pivot is transparency: admit what went wrong, show what you’re changing, and keep communicating until customers feel the difference, not just hear it.

Other Businesses That Pivot like Pros:

• LEGO Pivoted to adults → launched LEGO for Adults range → revenue up 17% YoY during 2020–2023. Read more if you’re bored… but trust me, they smashed it.

• Spotify Pivoted from music platform → into podcast empire → ad revenue up 75% and market domination. The Joe Rogan deal alone shifted the entire industry.

• Nike Pivoted to direct-to-consumer → now 42% of total revenue comes from its own channels. Pandemic-proof and future-proof.

• AirBnB Pivoted from global travel → to local, long-stay, “live anywhere” → revenue hit an all-time high in 2023. Brian Chesky literally rebuilt the business model in 60 days.

• Paramount+ Pivoted to streaming + franchise-first → subscriber growth exploded → over 63M global subscribers by 2024. Smart IP strategy = wins.

• Shopify Pivoted from “e-com for all” → to powering enterprise & retail ecosystems → GMV hit $197B in 2023. They evolved beyond small business to compete with Amazon.

• Apple Pivoted from hardware revenue → to services → services division hit $100B revenue. App Store, iCloud, TV+, Fitness, Pay — layered brilliance.

Now, The Pivots Bombed

These brands didn’t just pivot, they spun out, forgot their identity, and left their customers wondering who the hell they were trying to be.

4. JAGUAR — The Pivot That Lost the Goddamn Plot

Ok, I will admit I became obsessed by this cracker last year. Jaguar attempted a bold EV-era rebrand… and accidentally erased its own identity and lost both years of heritage and die-hard fans. Now I get it, their customers were dying…literally! But they forgot that people still age and still have aspirations. Even if your customers are ageing, it doesn’t mean your brand values should die with them. It means you need to evolve WITH them, not away from them. Instead, they left everyone confused.

Why They Had to Pivot:

Jaguar did have legitimate reasons to pivot:

• Declining sales long before Covid

• Loss of luxury market relevance

• EV competitors dominating the segment

• Heritage audience ageing out

• JLR announced Jaguar would go fully electric

• Needed a fresh, modern identity

Great reasons, but the wrong execution. I can almost imagine the boardroom conversations on this one; let’s go bold, what have we got to lose, dare to be different, adapt to the times.

What They Did:

✔ Launched “Copy Nothing” rebrand
✔ Removed cars from ads entirely
✔ Shifted to high-fashion, androgynous aesthetic
✔ Abandoned heritage messaging
✔ Tried to attract Gen Z luxury buyers
✔ Went woke and cocked it up ROYALLY

Watch the monstrocity here

When I first saw the Jaguar ad, I genuinely thought, “Okay… they’re messing with us.” Because the only thing crazier than that campaign would’ve been if they meant it.

I honestly assumed (really hoped) they were pulling off the ultimate marketing stunt! Drop a wild, hyper-woke, fashion-film-style ad that gets everyone talking, let the internet explode with “go woke, go broke” takes, and THEN… two-three months later…boom reveal the real rebrand. The one dripping in the old-school luxury, heritage, craftsmanship and prestige Jaguar is actually famous for.

That would’ve been brilliant.
Controversy → attention → punchline → brand rebirth.
A cheeky, intelligent masterstroke and the kind I LOVE!

But nope. That wasn’t the plan. This WAS the rebrand. And honestly? It’s become one of my favourite marketing cock-ups of all time.

Will Jaguar recover? Will they find a way to merge their heritage with their new EV-era direction? Maybe. But right now, the vibe isn’t great, because a pivot that abandons your identity and every single one of your customers, rarely lands the way you hope.

The Results:

• Sales down 41% YoY

• Jaguar = only 8% of JLR’s global volume

• Brand favourability down 60%

• Ad ranked in bottom 5% for clarity

Key Takeaway for Any Business

Never pivot so far that even your loyal customers can’t recognise you. Before you reinvent your brand, you’d better know exactly what your current customers love, what your future customers want, and whether the new direction connects the two or disconnects you from both.

Jaguar’s biggest mistake wasn’t boldness, it was blindness. They made a dramatic creative leap without anchoring it in customer insight, heritage, or expectation.

5. ZOOM — You Snooze You Lose

Zoom dominated the pandemic for obvious reasons, then struggled when the world reopened. Zoom had a global monopoly during Covid. Post-Covid they had… a landing page and some new buttons. While competitors innovated, Zoom stagnated.

Why They Had to Pivot:

Zoom’s challenges hit fast:

• Demand collapsed as offices reopened

• Microsoft Teams bundled meetings + chat + files

• Google integrated Meet into Workspace

• Subscription churn surged

• No wider product ecosystem

• Competitors had deeper enterprise stickiness

Zoom had no moat beyond video calls and that moat dried up.

What They Did:

✔ Expanded into AI
✔ Added collaboration tools
✔ Tried to move into enterprise solutions
✔ Built new “Zoom One” product suites

The Results:

• Stock down 87% from peak

• Market share from 43% → 28%

• Revenue growth from 326% → 3%

• Churn up 30%

Key Takeaway for Any Business:

If you wait to pivot until the crisis hits… It’s already too late. Smart businesses are constantly scanning the horizon, evolving their offer, upgrading their customer experience and strengthening their competitive edge before the market forces them to. Staying still is the fastest way to get overtaken.

6. X (Formerly Twitter) - The Pivot That Wasn’t a Pivot At All

I was obsessed with this one. From the outside, the Twitter → X transformation looked like one of the most dramatic pivots of the post-Covid era. A global platform flipping its name, logo, language and entire identity overnight? Wild.

But the deeper you look, the more you realise this wasn’t a pivot in the traditional marketing sense — this was something entirely different. But let’s not spoil the plot twist. First, let’s look at it the way the world saw it.

Why They Had to Pivot:

Twitter had real, visible problems:

• Ad revenue was dropping

• Bot and spam activity was out of control

• Creators were jumping ship to TikTok and Instagram

• Platform growth had slowed

• Content moderation was inconsistent

• Monetisation was basically non-existent

On paper, a pivot made sense. If you were watching from the outside, you’d assume: “Okay, classic big-brand moment. They’re reinventing for the next era.”

It looked like: New CEO → new direction → new identity → new business model.

What They Did:

Here’s the part the world actually saw and it happened almost overnight:

✔ Deleted the iconic blue bird
✔ Scrapped the name “Twitter”
✔ Removed “tweets” and “retweets”
✔ Replaced a globally beloved identity with a black-and-white “X” - Elon’s signature business eco system utilising X
✔ Wiped 17 years of brand equity in 17 hours
✔ No testing, no customer warm-up, no transition
✔ No staged rollout or brand evolution, just boom, new world
✔ Left users globally confused about what the platform even was now

It was the equivalent of walking into a McDonald’s one morning and discovering it’s suddenly called “Food X,” the Big Mac is now the “X-Burger,” and Ronald McDonald has been replaced by a geometric symbol. The shock wasn’t the scale of the change. It was the absence of any strategy that connected users to it.

The Results:

• Brand value dropped US$20 billion

• U.S. ad revenue fell 59%

• Monthly active users dropped 11–15%

• Global traffic slipped ~4% YoY

• Youth usage (18–29) fell from 42% → 33%

• Advertiser trust sank

• Threads and Bluesky surged

• Cultural relevance deteriorated almost instantly

Yes, X still has active users. Yes, niche communities are thriving. Yes, it’s not dead. It’s surviving.

From the outside, the world assumed this was a pivot. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t reactive. It wasn’t customer-led. It wasn’t data-driven. It wasn’t to solve Twitter’s problems. It wasn’t to refresh the brand. This was an acquisition move. Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter to fix Twitter. He bought Twitter to absorb Twitter. It had 350 million active monthly users, the real time infrastructure, the distribution and the existing tech platform to create X - the everything app he's been talking about since 1999:

A financial ecosystem.
A payments system.
A messaging hub.
A creator platform.
A video platform.
A commerce platform.
An AI layer.

He didn’t pivot Twitter. He rebranded it into the first version of a product that doesn’t fully exist yet. BUT,

Users didn’t sign up for X.
They signed up for Twitter.

So they’ve stuck around out of habit, but X is mostly in survival mode until the larger vision materialises (if it ever does).

That’s why the metrics are inconsistent. That’s why growth has dipped. That’s why advertisers are cautious.

Key Takeaway for Any Business:

Let’s be honest, there probably isn’t a relatable takeaway here for normal businesses. When you’re Elon Musk and you’re on track to be the world’s first trillionaire, you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want. In short, he’s a billionaire doing billionaire things. You don’t buy a brand like Twitter for its identity, you buy it for the tech, the infrastructure and the users. Losing billions in brand equity is a rounding error when the endgame is building an entirely new global ecosystem. Will it work? Probably. He has the money, the people and the power to brute-force his vision into existence. Is the world ready for it? Maybe not yet, and that’s exactly why X is lagging while the master plan cooks in the background.

Other Businesses That Didn’t Win:

• Zoomo Bikes (Australia) Scaled too fast → overextended globally → mass layoffs + retreat from markets in 2023–24. Hypergrowth without foundation is still a collapse.

• Meta’s Metaverse Pivot Spent $36 billion building the metaverse → user adoption flat → Reality Labs posted huge losses. This is the definition of “too early, too much, too soon.”

• CNN+ Launched OTT streaming platform → shut down in 30 days → $300M loss.
  Potentially the fastest corporate failure of the decade.

• Peloton Pandemic darling → misread post-Covid behaviour → inventory pileups → stock collapsed 90%. They pivoted backwards into their old model while demand evaporated.

• Disney’s 2022 Content Pivot New direction alienated core audiences → subscriber churn spiked → Disney+ lost 12.5M subs in one quarter. They’re still trying to recover.

• Snapchat’s AR Hardware Pivot Spectacles 3 + Pixy drone → discontinued, huge write-offs, no mainstream adoption. Clever tech, wrong timing, wrong market.

The Smart Pivot Framework

Across every case study, one truth stands out:

Businesses don’t fail because they pivot. They fail because they pivot blindly and absolutely no good can come from panic-pivoting.

Whether you’re running a global brand or a local SME, your pivot should always be:

✔ Customer-aligned
✔ Values-driven
✔ Strategically timed
✔ Clearly communicated
✔ True to your identity
✔ Based on real behaviour and real needs

Anything else is guesswork. And guesswork is bloody expensive.

Here’s what the last five years have made undeniable:

THE WINNERS

The brands that win in a volatile economy are the ones that:

• stay in alignment with their values

• listen to their customers

• adapt quickly but strategically

• honour their heritage

• simplify, not overcomplicate

• evolve the model, not the personality

THE LOSERS

The brands that lose are the ones who:

• panic pivot

• chase trends

• forget their audience

• abandon what made them trusted

• communicate vaguely

• try to become something they never were

My last point to make…

Business is hard. Not just for you. Not just for the little guys. For everyone.

Even the biggest brands in the world, with billion-dollar budgets, global teams, data scientists, strategists, agencies, analysts and armies of decision-makers… still screw it up. They still panic. They still misread their customers. They still launch disasters. They still miss the mark.

So if you’re sitting at your desk feeling overwhelmed, stressed, doubting yourself, thinking you’re failing…you’re not. You’re just doing business in 2025.

Keep going.
Keep evolving.
Keep listening to your customers.
Keep backing yourself.

Because the brands that survive the next five years won’t be the perfect ones. They’ll be the ones brave enough to keep showing up.

Unsure Whether You Need to Pivot?

You don’t need to guess. This is literally what I do, for high-value clients who want smarter marketing, stronger positioning and real, measurable growth.

If you want your next pivot to be:

• strategic

• customer-aligned

• identity-true

• bold

• and commercially effective

Let’s talk.

Because the brands that win the next five years won’t be the loudest. They’ll be the ones who adapt to their surroundings intelligently.