I have a special spot in my heart for Memory Brands, because I have worked on so many of them and found them to be rather misunderstood.
Memory brands are not smaller benchmark brands. They have high awareness. They have distribution. They often have decades of household penetration under their belts. This is comparable to benchmark brands.
What they lack is active relevance, which a benchmark often has. They are remembered. They are not chosen with intent, unlike a benchmark brand.
This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter. Join the world’s smartest marketers and subscribe here for actionable insights delivered directly to your inbox.
This situation rarely happens suddenly. It is gradual. And it is often organizationally produced through incrementalism and escalation bias.
Most memory brands sit inside large portfolios. They are not the current growth story. They are not the innovation darling. They are not the internal buzz. But they are too large to abandon. So, leadership hedges.
As a result, I often had to negotiate what I like to call “just enough-ism.”
Just enough communication to signal life.
Just enough trade funding to defend space.
Just enough packaging change to suggest motion.
But, also:
Not enough to rebuild meaning.
Not enough to reset trajectory.
Not enough to exit intentionally.
This middle state feels prudent. And in the short-term, it is very viable. But it is structurally expensive in the long term because the category does not stand still while you hedge. Each year, another brand excites buyers, another competitor defines what “new” means, private label improves perceived quality, and retailers raise expectations about incrementality.
It is harder to maintain the status quo in an ever-changing environment. It takes more funding to secure the same feature. More discount to hold the same volume. More justification to defend the same shelf. Eventually, maintenance becomes escalation.
Retailers do not operate on nostalgia. They operate on productivity. When a brand requires increasing support to generate flat results, it weakens structurally.
At the same time, consumers adapt. Light buyers reduce repertoire presence because the brand no longer signals relevance. Value buyers compare on price because familiarity without meaning collapses into elasticity. Younger cohorts form habits elsewhere.
The result is that the brand persists in memory structures. It recedes from current routines.
Cohort penetration, search intent, and channel mix shifts are earlier signals than topline dollars. However, organizations delay action because flat share can mask consumer decline. So can dollar growth driven by pricing and mix while unit volume and penetration erode. Revenue may appear stable, making it easier to defer hard decisions to a future budget cycle or to a future team.
The danger is not immediate collapse. Memory brands are often too big to fail quickly. The danger is compounding cost and slow, creeping irrelevance that can be hard to recover from. Each year of hedging increases the investment required to earn the same outcome. Eventually, the brand’s trajectory is dictated by the category, not by leadership.
So, what can teams do to prevent such a future?
Revival
Revival is the dream. It is the award winner, the conference keynote anchor, the story people reference for decades. If I asked you for an incredible turnaround, you would likely think of a revival example. Something like Old Spice.
But revivals are incredible because they are rare. Revival requires a multi-year commitment in organizations that are built around annual planning and quarterly proof. It demands patience in an environment that gets bored with brand design every two years. But, each year a brand delays, hedges, or changes it up, revival becomes more expensive. Relevance gaps widen. Cohorts age out. Retail leverage weakens. The funding required to rebuild meaning adds up.
Revival is possible, but it is not just a reflection of a team’s ability to deliver it. It is a multi-year commitment to redefine the brand’s role, rebuild meaning, and fund sustained communication at scale. And in many organizations, a memory brand is relegated to a strategic bucket more akin to “sustain” or “deprioritize,” making revival structurally challenging regardless of the team’s capabilities.
Reframe
When teams do not have the budget or the organizational buy-in for revival, they do a “revival-lite”. They follow all the big brand-driven best practices but use performance marketing to squeeze as much ROI as possible. They think efficiency and scale will make up for the ongoing decline in spending. This may slow decline, but it does not reverse it because the fundamental assumption of revival is driving relevance and meaning at scale. And you usually cannot drive relevance at scale by reducing budgets without making some hard choices about audience, assortment, pipeline and mix.
A reframe is something different. It is about choosing one attainable growth audience and tightening the portfolio and proposition so you become disproportionately meaningful to them.
Instead of doing more with less, think of this as doing less with less so that you can achieve more.
Fewer audiences.
Clearer role.
Sharper pipeline.
More concentrated investment.
Reframe accepts that the brand may not return to mass ubiquity anytime soon. It aims instead to drive incrementality to retail within a defined cohort so that they can restore brand leverage. This creates a platform for potential future expansion. But if an organization decides against expansion, it does create a far healthier evaluation for exit than a brand that is consistently declining.
If revival chases scale through reinvention, reframe builds scale through concentration.
Retire
Retire is an intentional exit strategy. With emphasis on the word intentional. This requires transparency and radical honesty. There are going to be brands that do not fit in with your strategic priorities, brands that are too expensive to revive or reframe, or brands that you do not wish to commit resources to.
Define the timeline. Extract profit. Simplify complexity. Exit deliberately.
If you wait until retirement is the only option, it will affect your organization’s reputation and your team’s morale. Drift is more expensive than deletion. Passive erosion consumes capital and managerial bandwidth.
Competing Against A Memory Brand
If I were to be entirely honest, I’d say: instead of going after the category giant (aka the benchmark), target a sizeable memory brand and position yourself as the more relevant or value-friendly alternative on that shelf.
I say this because, from experience, memory brands are the ones organizations will hedge on. They are less likely to defend aggressively. They are less likely to commit strategically. They are more likely to use their high salience and past equity to defend the ubiquity they no longer have. They are more likely to rely on their strong buyer relationships or use other desirable brands in their portfolio to negotiate. Retailers respect that, but from a category management perspective, they prioritize consumer value over brand legacy. If you can demonstrate you can drive pull, you are functionally demonstrating that you will drive better velocity. As a result, you become the more future-friendly bet for that retailer.
As a marketer, your job is to compete. Compete differently with The Blake Project.
The Behavioral Rreframe
If you have a memory brand, you need to embrace the fact that it exists as a result of organizational decisions and prioritization. Thus, the path you take needs to reflect your organizational goals and priorities as well. The only path that is not in your organization’s best interest is ambiguity.
Harvesting margin while expecting recruitment.
Reducing communication while demanding relevance.
Optimizing trade while ignoring meaning.
Hedging guarantees escalating cost and declining leverage.
Remember: memory brands decline because they are familiar without being important.
- If you choose revival, commit.
- If you choose reframing, focus.
- If you choose retirement, execute.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Sweta Kannan, CPG Marketing and Innovation Executive
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable at pivotal moments of change. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth, and Brand Education