Strategic Brand Management: Lifecycle, Decline, and Revival

Posted on Sep 4, 2025 in Business Administration and Management (BAM)

Any marketing actions a firm takes today can change consumers’ brand awareness or brand image and have an indirect effect on the success of future marketing activities. For example, the frequent use of temporary price decreases as sales promotions may create or strengthen a “discount” association to the brand, with potentially adverse implications for customer loyalty and responses to future price changes or non-price-oriented marketing communication efforts. Marketers must actively manage brand equity over time by reinforcing the brand meaning and, if necessary, by making adjustments to the marketing program to identify new sources of brand equity.

Brand Lifecycle Dynamics

Brands are typically viewed as having a lifecycle. This is a common, though not inexorable, pattern.

Product Lifecycle vs. Brand Lifecycle

The product life cycle does exist. All products (physical attributes) have an end. The typical pattern is: a birth and launch phase, a growth phase, a maturity phase, and a decline.

  • Brands that are attached to a single product, or even a single version of a product, are subject to the product life cycle.

Addressing Brand Fading and Decline

  • Brand fading can be due to mismanagement, consumer changes, or competitive shifts.

To prevent decline, brand managers can focus on:

  1. Preserving Brand Equity: Through strategic marketing mix choices.
  2. Developing Brand Equity: By stretching the brand concept.
  3. Reviving Brand Equity: By building on the brand identity to update its positioning.

The decline of a brand, however, begins with a slide in the level of perceived difference between it and the competition and, in particular, with the opinion leaders of the product category. The esteem and the emotional ties are still alive and well, but the consumer realizes that the quality gap has been bridged between the brand and its competition. Consumers may still like it but could become disloyal.

This underscores that a drop in differentiation signals the beginning of decline, regardless of how strong the liking score may be.

Market Transformations & Brand Fading Sources

Common Sources of Brand Fading:

  • Marketing Mix:
    • Promotions: Incoherent, insufficient, or repetitive strategies.
    • Product: Reduced quality or lack of innovation.
    • Pricing: Over-reliance on discounts.
    • Place: Distribution misfit or disappearance from key channels.
  • Brand Portfolio: Daughter brands diluting parent brands.
  • Changes in Consumer Base: Shifts in taste and aspirations, negative user image, or product category decline.
  • Competition: Emergence of low-cost substitutes or superior product innovation.

Strategies for Sustaining Brand Strength

The process can be visualized as a pyramid: Brand Reinforcement (top), Brand Development (middle), and Brand Rejuvenation (bottom).

Brand Reinforcement: Maintaining Core Equity

Important considerations include:

  1. Permanent product innovations, such as prototype upgrades and line extensions.
  2. Strengthening brand presence through strategic distribution.
  3. Renewed communication efforts to highlight innovation and persuade target audiences.
  4. Adjusting pricing (up or down) to maintain brand distinction.
  5. Adjusting or restructuring the brand portfolio.
  6. Protecting sources of brand equity from competition and imitation.

Brand Development & Stretch: Expanding Reach

This involves both physical aspects (form, design, experience) and intangible aspects (benefits, personality, values). Consider Core Brand Facets for disruptive stretch and Peripheral Brand Facets for incremental stretch.

Brand Rejuvenation: Revitalizing for Growth

The revitalization of brands always starts with a major work of internal rejuvenation. Revitalizations and revivals are based on updating the brand’s overall offering while staying true to its core identity. Revival means aiming at a new growth market. The brand must find new relevance and differentiation.

Redefining Brand Essence: Seven Key Strategies
  1. Revitalizing through new uses or applications.
  2. Revitalizing through changes in distribution channels.
  3. Revitalizing through product or service innovations.
  4. Revitalizing through targeted market segmentation.
  5. Revitalizing by engaging with opinion leaders and influencers.
  6. Revitalizing through comprehensive 360-degree communications.
  7. Changing the underlying business model.

“Recreating a consistent flow of sales, putting the brand back to life.” (Kapferer, 2012)

“Sleeping Beauties”: Untapped Brand Potential

These are brands whose names still evoke resonance in our memory. There are good reasons for that. As assets, these brands are still endowed with significant brand awareness, attributes, and beliefs. It is often less costly to build upon these existing premises than to start from scratch.

“Brands that are no longer active on the market but which retain potential brand equity because of the brand’s heritage.” (Dion and Mazzalovo, 2016, p.1)

Reinterpreting Brand Features for Revival

Identify positive aesthetic and symbolic brand associations, including:

  • Product: Design, technology, and know-how.
  • History/Heritage:
    • People: Founder, iconic clients, historic personalities.
    • Places: Original locations, town/country of origin.
    • Historical Events: Significant moments in the brand’s past.
    • Competitors: Past competitors who are now market leaders.

Leveraging Brand Heritage for Modern Relevance

  • Identify the Arcadia: The idealized collective memory of the past (Brown et al., 2003).
  • Define the Allegory: The stories, narratives, and metaphors that demonstrate how the brand symbolizes that past.
  • Authenticate the brand’s heritage: Ensure the brand’s history and its rearticulation feel true and real, often by displaying collected evidence and securing approvals from publicly recognized cultural intermediaries.