The short answer
A brand usually stops growing when it stops winning new buyers. Over time, its memories and associations fade, turn negative, or stop meaning anything to a new generation, so the brand no longer comes to mind at the moment of choice. To restart growth, find the associations that hold buyers back. Keep the positive ones, stop the negative ones, and add new ones that build on the brand assets you already own. Then put those cues everywhere people meet the brand.
Six signs your brand has stopped growing
Brand leaders often bring these problems to us. Each one looks different on a dashboard. Underneath, they usually share one cause.
Household penetration is falling
Fewer households buy the brand each year. The core still buys, but it is shrinking, and new buyers are not taking its place.
Private label is taking share
Shoppers decide the store brand is just as good. The price gap starts to look like a bad deal instead of a sign of better quality.
The brand isn’t connecting with younger buyers
A heritage brand that older buyers love means little to millennials and Gen Z. The fear is that any change will push the loyal buyers away.
Challengers are taking share
Smaller, newer brands grow fast in your category. They look fresh, and your brand starts to look like the default that nobody chooses on purpose.
The category is turning into a commodity
Buyers see no real difference between brands, so they shop on price and on whatever is on promotion.
The brand has no clear point of difference
Ask ten people what the brand stands for and you get ten answers.
“When a brand starts meaning different things to different people, it stops being a brand.”
The common cause: the brand lost its place in buyers’ minds
Your brand is the network of memories and associations it holds in people’s minds. We call that network the Brand Connectome®. When the network is strong, the brand comes to mind first and feels like the obvious answer, so people reach for it without thinking. When it weakens, people still know the brand, but they stop choosing it.
“When the brand connectome grows in the mind, it grows in the marketplace as well.”
Brands lose their place in three ways. Positive associations fade because the brand stops using them. Negative associations build up, often where the tracker can’t see them. And the brand fails to introduce itself to the next generation of buyers.
“The reason these legacy brands tend to fall off over time is not because they’re old. It’s because they forget that they need to reintroduce themselves to each generation of customers.”
Why the usual fixes stall
Teams with a stalled brand work hard. Much of the effort goes into fixes aimed at the conscious mind, while the choice is made by instinct.
Leaning harder on the core customer
It feels safe to protect the buyers you have, but the core alone can’t grow the brand. The third rule in Leslie Zane’s book, The Power of Instinct, puts it plainly: “Finding new customers accelerates growth. Relying on existing ones is a trap.”
Discounts and loyalty programs
Points and coupons can lift sales for a while. They don’t change what the brand means, so the lift fades.
“Loyalty to me is trying to buy somebody’s affection.”
A new campaign idea every year
One insight can make a good ad and still leave the business where it was. The choice is made by the whole network of memories, not by one idea.
“An insight is one-dimensional. It’s just one thing.”
A rebrand that throws away what people know
New logos, colors and characters can erase cues that buyers spent years learning. When Jeopardy! lost its long-time host, it had no choice but to replace its most distinctive asset, and its ratings fell while guest hosts rotated. Most brands do have a choice.
“Stop constantly changing your brand assets. The key to driving organic growth is to piggyback new positive associations on to the brand assets you already have.”
Cutting the price
Price is often blamed, and often it is not the cause. In one private label case on our results page, price wasn’t the reason: the brand had stopped showing the one thing shoppers used to recognize it by. Switching slowed without cutting price.
How to restart growth: a brand growth strategy in three steps
The problem sits in the buyer’s mind, so the plan starts there too. We work in three steps: Map, Trigger, Grow.
1. Map the brand in memory
Build the Brand Connectome® for your core buyers and for your growth target, the buyers you need to win. Map your competitors the same way. The map shows which associations pull buyers toward you, which push them away, and which are missing. It is built in the first twelve weeks.
2. Find the triggers
Triggers are cognitive shortcuts: visual and verbal cues the mind already has a story for. We identify and test them to decide what to keep, what to stop and what to add. New associations work fastest when they build on the ones the brand already owns.
“Adding onto existing memories always works faster than starting from scratch.”
3. Grow everywhere buyers meet the brand
Put the triggers into positioning, packaging, briefs, campaigns, the shelf, the site and the sales conversation. Your team and your agencies do the work. The Growth Blueprint keeps everyone building the same memories. See our approach.
Win new buyers, not only loyal ones
Brands grow by adding households. That means turning people who buy other brands into people who buy yours.
“The key to sustainable growth is household penetration and that means you must constantly be converting competitive users over to your brand.”
This is why we talk about instinctive brand preference instead of loyalty. Buyers who reach for the same brand every time are not pledging loyalty. They are following an instinct built from memories, and instincts can change. Your competitors can win them, and so can you.
Big brands can come back
A long decline does not mean the brand is finished. A brand that people have known for decades has a deep store of memories to build on.
“The good news is that especially these big brands, because they have a large physical footprint in the brain to begin with, they actually bounce back extremely quickly if you feed them the right nutrients.”
The nutrients are the triggers: positive associations and distinctive brand assets, used again and again. Vans is a public example. The brand came back with young buyers by reconnecting to what it had always meant: skateboarding and being alternative.
