Marketing Evolution
Brand decline almost always begins not with failure but with success. A product resonates. A campaign exceeds its targets. A positioning strategy delivers market share. And then naturally, rationally, the organisation does what successful organisations do. It doubles down. It builds systems to replicate what worked. It allocates resources toward defending and extending the advantage it has earned. This is sensible management. It can also be a trap. bring themselves to retire what it had built in time to survive.
MARKETING AFRICA
Marketing Evolution
Marion Wakahe
Why Great Brands Decline And How To Prevent The Drift
In 2007, Kodak was still one of the most recognised brand names on earth. Not just a company with strong financials, a genuinely beloved brand. The name had been inside people ' s homes and at their most important moments for over a century. Weddings. Graduations. First birthdays. The yellow box with the red lettering was not just a product. It was a cultural institution. By 2012, Kodak had filed for bankruptcy.
Most people who tell this story focus on the innovation failure, specifically, the engineer inside Kodak ' s own laboratories who built the first digital camera in 1975, only for management to shelve it rather than risk disrupting a profitable film business. That story is true and instructive, but there’ s a bigger story.
Running alongside the innovation failure was a quieter, more insidious process: the gradual disconnection between what Kodak was offering and what its customers needed. Not a dramatic collapse. Not a crisis that could have been managed with a good PR response. Just a slow, structural drift, the kind that most organisations do not notice until the distance has become too great to close.
This is the brand failure that most marketing conversations avoid. Not the spectacular public crisis such as the advertisement that causes outrage or the product recall that makes headlines, but the quiet one. The kind that happens not in a single bad week but across years of small decisions, each individually defensible, collectively fatal.
The success trap nobody warns you about
Here is the uncomfortable truth about brand decline: it almost always begins not with failure but with success. A product resonates. A campaign exceeds its targets. A positioning strategy delivers market share. And then naturally, rationally, the organisation does what successful organisations do. It doubles down. It builds systems to replicate what worked. It allocates resources toward defending and extending the advantage it has earned. This is sensible management. It can also be a trap.
Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath calls this the‘ success trap’ i. e., the organisational tendency to optimise existing business models so intensively that leaders fail to notice the arena they are competing in has fundamentally shifted. The better you become at what you do, the harder it is to see that what you do may soon be irrelevant.
Blockbuster ' s store network was genuinely excellent. Nokia ' s hardware engineering was world-class. Kodak ' s film chemistry was unmatched. These were real strengths, not corporate vanity. They were also the reason each of these companies could not
Brand decline almost always begins not with failure but with success. A product resonates. A campaign exceeds its targets. A positioning strategy delivers market share. And then naturally, rationally, the organisation does what successful organisations do. It doubles down. It builds systems to replicate what worked. It allocates resources toward defending and extending the advantage it has earned. This is sensible management. It can also be a trap. bring themselves to retire what it had built in time to survive.
The late Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School offers the most useful framework for understanding why. His Jobs-to-be-Done theory argues that customers do not buy products. They hire them to do a specific job in their lives. Brand decline happens when the underlying job shifts but the brand keeps optimising the old tool rather than following the job. Consider what this looks like in practice:
Kodak ' s customers were not hiring film. They were hiring a way to capture memories, share them with people they loved, and hold onto moments that mattered. For most of the twentieth century, film was the best available tool for that job. When digital cameras, and then smartphones, offered to do the same job faster, more cheaply and with immediate social sharing, customers did not switch away from Kodak out of disloyalty. They simply hired a better tool. Kodak, focused on optimising the chemistry of film, never fully accepted that the job had moved on.
Blockbuster ' s customers were not hiring a physical store. They were hiring an evening ' s entertainment. When Netflix offered to deliver the same entertainment without requiring a trip, a late fee or a specific closing time, the job stayed the same. The preferred tool changed completely.
The pattern is the same in every case. The brand that understands what job it is hired to do can survive almost any change in the tools available to do it. The brand that confuses the tool with the job will be replaced when a better tool arrives.
The metrics that hide the problem
One of the reasons brand decline is so consistently underestimated is that the standard measurements most organisations rely on are not designed to detect it.
Sales figures tell you what happened in the
O8 MAL72 / 26 ISSUE