The key to keeping your relevance and your message fresh to your target audience is to not be afraid of reinventing yourself and your company.

All the greats do it. Look at Madonna, who has undergone several transformations in a career that defies the average life span of music performers at the top of their profession.

From a corporate sense, it makes perfect sense too. If you position yourself as leaders in a certain field and you see the trends and developments in your industry moving to a new and fast-growing category that is allied to what you already do, of course you should reinvent yourself.

Certain things need to pre-exist for you to be successful. You need to have been a credible player in the previous industry. It needs to be a credible stretch from the old company to the new one. You also need to be credible in that new space. If the belief’s not there, the success won’t be either, and chances are you’ll flounder.

I used to work with a company whose boss positioned his company a certain way, and proclaimed it to be his 3rd global business. He then reinvented the company, rebranded it, and relaunched it as a new entity, with a new mission. It was also now his 4th global business. Same company, reinvented.