When Brands Grow Old
This is a very interesting phenomenon: some brands that have a specific emotional background tend to age together with their consumers. Many examples would come from cosmetics brands: these very often target various ages with various products. Soon as the audience is firmly up on your product you have to treat them with special care: people are the same but they are not the same people any longer. Communication must change respectively, and so must the product accompanied by that communication. Chanel #5 did a good job to come back, who else?
Something similar goes to brands in transition economies. These brands, however, grow old overnight. They do not just age with ageing audience but rather become outdated with new mentality coming in. Economies are set free, borders open and new strong brands with strong managerial expertise come to play. The “old” brands are just not able to compete, and the only connotative aspect that is left is the nostalgic emotions that people feel when hearing the brand name familiar from those “good old days when we were young”… This is the feeling that managers often appeal to when trying to revive their brands. But in most cases it’s a dead end - the audience is not as promising as the new wave…