Throughout the history of leading global brands, one rule keeps repeating: brands do not collapse because they lose market share, but because they lose their strategic role within the organization. When a brand is reduced to a communication function—rather than a strategic lens that shapes how a company understands the world, operates internally, and creates value—crisis becomes only a matter of time. Classic failures such as Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, and Uber offer us deeper perspectives on the true role of branding and the alignment between brand positioning and business strategy.
The Brand No Longer Aligns with the Business Strategy
This is the most common issue, yet one that many companies fail to diagnose. Businesses change their strategies every 3–5 years—expanding into new markets, shifting customer segments, adding services, going digital, restructuring operations—but many brands don’t update their “story” accordingly. They continue to “think” and “act” based on past experiences while the company itself has moved into a new phase.
When the brand and business strategy drift apart, the company creates invisible costs: the cost of explaining itself, the cost of communication, and the cost of declining customer trust. This is why branding is not a coat of paint—it is a core part of strategic architecture.
Kodak did not die because it lacked technological capability; they invented the digital camera. But the business context had changed: value no longer lay in film rolls but in the flow of digital data. Kodak continued to position itself within an outdated context—“a film photography company”—instead of the new one: “a company that preserves memories.” Their attachment to a fading business reality weakened the entire brand system, not due to poor marketing but because they lacked a renewed brand philosophy aligned with a new business landscape.
Nokia once dominated 40% of the global market—a position few technology brands have ever achieved. But “brand strength” could not save them from strategic misalignment. Nokia did not fail technically; they failed to interpret market change. When consumers shifted from evaluating phones by hardware to evaluating them through ecosystems, Nokia could not reposition or expand its brand from “devices” to “platforms.” They delayed change due to internal conflict—what MIT Sloan research refers to as organizational inertia.
A Brand Is Not a Logo — It Is a Commitment in Every Action
Brand identity is merely the visible part of a much larger structure. When a company changes its logo but does not change decision-making, experience design, product creation, or how employees treat customers, the “rebranding” becomes an aesthetic exercise, not a strategic one. Research by Harvard Business School shows that changing identity without changing behavior actually decreases brand equity in the first 18 months because customers perceive the brand as inauthentic.
Blockbuster had strong marketing, massive budgets, and high awareness, yet their brand and business model conflicted at the core. Their brand promise was “convenient entertainment,” but their profit model relied on penalizing customers with late fees—creating frustration. This contradicted the brand’s commitment and created misalignment in execution.
Netflix understood this better: “hassle-free entertainment” was not just a slogan—it was a strategic doctrine that they turned into competitive advantage. Blockbuster did not lose because of technology, but because their brand no longer represented what customers valued.
Brands Collapse in the Boardroom, Not in the Marketplace
When branding is recognized as an asset to be built and protected, a critical question emerges: Does the team truly “live the brand” the company claims? Research by Gallup and Harvard shows that companies with strong brand cultures outperform in productivity, talent retention, and growth. Conversely, when culture diverges from brand strategy, the brand loses coherence, customer touchpoints become inconsistent, and trust erodes.
Branding does not operate in the Marketing department. It operates in the behavior of 30, 300, or 30,000 employees every day. When internal teams do not share the same value system, the brand fragments into disconnected experiences.
Uber in 2017 is a prime example of brand failure rooted in culture. Externally, Uber declared “innovation, progress, and technology for users,” but internally it faced accusations of being “toxic and discriminatory.” The result was a collapse in trust and a decline in brand equity. Once again, Peter Drucker’s famous quote rings true: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
The Strongest Brands Are Not the Most Famous, but the Most Adaptive
Brand maturity does not mean “stop doing branding”; it means elevating branding into a core strategic function that evolves with every shift in the business. The world’s biggest failures remind us of something simple yet often overlooked: a brand is a living organism. And every living organism must adapt to survive.
A mature brand understands that branding must reflect the business strategy; brand building and identity must originate from within; logos and visual identity must be the result of strategy, not the starting point. Most importantly, the brand must adapt to market changes faster than its competitors. Only then can the brand remain strong enough to accompany the business strategy through all cycles of change.