Market Research for Aging Brands

---

One can expect car design, computer operating systems, and clothing styles to change. Shouldn’t it be the same with the look of a brand? When is it time to give a brand an update? The first sign is a subtle change in what a brand is “about.” Market research is a critical element in expressing the new brand. Well-executed market research enables companies to redesign their brand. The end product should define what they do, who they are, and why people can count on them.

Redefining Brands in a Global Economy

Strong brands outpace the market average. They also outstrip the financial markets index. Many businesses now reserve sizable portions of their marketing budgets for digital media. This digital budget is necessary to remain relevant in the marketplace. It also helps them to forge deeper connections with their customers.

Also, a new generation of global brands is evolving. Older brands should take note of the strategies they are using. In recent years it has become a priority to build a robust and reliable brand culture. Customers should be able to recognize brand culture wherever it is in the world. The rise of digital channels has moved the brand emphasis from structure to culture.

The upswing of digital has also transformed the way marketers communicate. Marketers now connect with their agency partners and customers using digital technology. The primary duties and the central features of marketing stay the same. The functions have had to increase in scope, though. The new tasks are to accommodate the shifting nature of the world in which brands operate.

An excellent example of a brand redefining itself in the global economy is the Wyndham Group. Wyndham is the world’s largest hotel company with more than 7800 properties. The company recently overhauled its 16 brands. It also invested in new technology and modernized its hotel properties. Furthermore, the group announced brand-new partnerships and benefits to serve economy-minded tourists.

Market Research for Aging Brands: How Heritage Equity Becomes Growth Capital

Aging brands carry a hidden balance sheet item: decades of recognition that newer entrants cannot purchase at any price. The question is whether that recognition still converts.

Market research for aging brands answers a specific commercial question. Where does residual equity still drive purchase intent, and where has it calcified into nostalgia that no longer moves units? The brands that get this answer right run circles around challengers. The ones that guess spend marketing budget defending positions consumers have already abandoned.

Why Aging Brands Outperform When Equity Is Measured Correctly

Heritage is an asset when it signals reliability, craftsmanship, or institutional trust. It becomes a liability when it signals stagnation. The line between the two is rarely visible from inside the building. Procter and Gamble’s repositioning of Old Spice, Ford’s segmentation work behind the F-150 lineage, and Levi’s recovery in premium denim all rest on the same insight: legacy brands grow when management isolates which equity attributes still command price premium and which have decayed into background noise.

This requires a different research design than launch work. The unit of analysis is not the product. It is the gap between perceived brand promise and current category expectations.

According to SIS International Research, aging brands across consumer goods, B2B industrial, and financial services share a recurring pattern: 30 to 40 percent of equity attributes that drove growth a generation ago still drive purchase intent today, another 20 percent have become table stakes, and the remainder have decayed into associations consumers describe with neutral or negative language. The commercial value sits in identifying which attribute belongs in which bucket before the next campaign cycle.

The Methodologies That Separate Signal From Sentiment

Brand tracking studies tell management what consumers say. They do not reliably tell management what consumers do, or why. Aging brands need a sharper instrument because the gap between stated affinity and actual purchase widens with brand age. Older consumers report loyalty out of habit. Younger consumers report awareness without consideration.

Four methodologies carry the weight in this work:

Ethnographic research reveals how the brand actually shows up in the home, the workshop, or the procurement decision. A Fortune 500 packaged goods manufacturer discovers its 60-year-old brand sits in the pantry but not on the counter. That spatial detail predicts decline two years before tracking data confirms it.

B2B expert interviews with category buyers, distributors, and former employees surface the institutional memory that consumer panels cannot access. In industrial markets, the OEM procurement analyst who has specified the same component for fifteen years knows exactly when the brand stopped innovating and which competitor filled the gap.

Focus groups segmented by relationship vintage separate consumers who adopted the brand decades ago from those who encountered it recently. The two groups describe the same brand in different vocabularies. The vocabulary gap is the repositioning brief.

Competitive intelligence on private label and challenger brands quantifies what aging brands are losing and to whom. Total cost of ownership benchmarking matters here because heritage brands often command a price premium that the installed base no longer perceives as justified.

The Equity Decay Matrix

Aging brands benefit from a structured view of where each equity attribute currently sits. The Equity Decay Matrix maps attributes against two axes: relevance to current category drivers, and exclusivity to the brand versus the category.

Source: SIS International Research

The discipline is in the second and fourth quadrants. Brand teams resist demoting attributes that built the franchise. Consumers have already done it.

What Leading Firms Do Differently

The conventional approach to aging brand research is a tracker refresh and a creative brief. The better approach treats the brand as a portfolio of attributes with independent decay curves, then sequences interventions accordingly.

SIS International’s qualitative work across cosmetics, packaged goods, and industrial categories has surfaced a consistent finding: aging brands recover faster when management addresses one mid-decay attribute at a time rather than relaunching the master brand. Coca-Cola’s measured handling of classic formulation cues, IBM’s deliberate shift from hardware heritage to services credibility, and Burberry’s selective reactivation of pattern equity all reflect this sequencing logic.

The second differentiator is segmentation by category entry point. Aging brands serve at least three buyer types: legacy users who entered the category through this brand, switchers who arrived from competitors, and new entrants for whom the brand is one option among many. Each cohort weights heritage differently. Communicating to all three with the same message wastes the heritage premium on the audiences who do not value it and underdelivers craftsmanship cues to the audience that pays for them.

Where B2B Industrial Aging Brands Find Upside

In industrial markets, aging brands often hold installed base advantages that consumer brands do not. Specification lock-in, qualified supplier status, and aftermarket revenue strategy all favor incumbents. The risk is that procurement modernization, reshoring feasibility reviews, and supplier qualification audits open the door to challengers that would not have been considered a decade ago.

Research designed for this context combines installed base analytics with structured interviews across the procurement chain. The output is not a brand health score. It is a map of which accounts are vulnerable to displacement, which competitors are positioned to take them, and which equity attributes still carry weight in the specification conversation. Caterpillar, 3M, and Siemens have all run versions of this analysis when defending category leadership against lower-cost specialized entrants.

Translating Research Into Commercial Decisions

The deliverable that matters is not the report. It is the decision the report enables. For aging brands, three decisions recur: which attributes to anchor in the next positioning cycle, which product lines to extend versus prune, and which channels carry the heritage premium versus erode it.

Market research for aging brands earns its budget when it reduces the variance of those decisions. Senior leadership at a heritage brand does not need another tracker. Leadership needs to know which 20 percent of equity attributes will produce 80 percent of the next growth curve, and which channels and cohorts will pay for them.

That answer is recoverable. It requires the right methodology, segmentation discipline, and a willingness to retire attributes the founders would have defended. The brands that do this work consistently outperform the ones that treat heritage as a fixed asset.

About SIS International

SIS International offers Quantitative, Qualitative, and Strategy Research. We provide data, tools, strategies, reports, and insights for decision-making. We also conduct interviews, surveys, focus groups, and other Market Research methods and approaches. Contact us for your next Market Research project.