Myth of the Brand Life Cycle

Throughout my working life, there has been a concept, a marketing trope, a metaphor that has consistently been held as a “truth” – the brand/product life cycle. I won’t bore you with the theory. You know it.

It’s just that it has never seemed to me to have any validity, nor be of any use. Fundamentally it’s derived from the concept of animal life cycles, of course. These happen naturally, whereas brand/product life cycles occur through lack of imagination and lack of will.

Well and continuously marketed and innovated, there’s no reason why brands should not go on indefinitely.

Here are sixteen brands that I’ve personally worked on the marketing and innovation of that were launched well before I was born and will be here long after I’ve gone:

Louis Vuitton (born 1854)
Bacardi (1862)
London Underground (1863)
Nestlé (1866)
Campbell Soup (1869)
Toshiba (1875)
Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles (1881)
Marks & Spencer (1884)
Coca-Cola (1886)
Smirnoff (1886)
Philips (1891)
Fairy Soap (1898)
Persil (1903)
Evian (1908)
Johnnie Walker (1909)
Electrolux (1919)

The people working so hard on them today are, just as I have been over the years, custodians.

Shelf-stacking in Nuneaton

Of course, before I started real work, as a teenager I had a holiday job. It was at the Marks & Spencer's store in my home town, Nuneaton, around 1960-62, and I was a shelf-stacker.

But because what now appears to be called “logistics” was in its infancy, what I did in reality was shift the arriving goods manually off the delivery vans into the store-room and from there into the store itself. The company moved into chilled foods for the first time while I was there, so we installed lots of new equipment.

It all came to mind because it has been announced by the company that that shop is to close early in the New Year after 80 years in the Market Place - a “devastating blow”, according to Nuneaton News.

Although the technology and systems have changed dramatically in the intervening half century, the principles I learned then mean that I still understand the fundamentals of retail. (I don’t believe I mentioned this experience when I worked again as a consultant to M&S many years later.)

I also learned a good deal about how management hierarchy works. One of the greatest fears of the Nuneaton store manager, almost an obsession, was that the Midlands area manager, next door to God himself, should walk in unannounced to inspect, and would discover dog dirt on the shiny floor just inside the front doors. You know what happened next…