Perspective & Approach

Every declining business has an explanation for what went wrong. The category shifted. A competitor outspent them. The consumer changed. The economy softened. These explanations are rarely wrong, but also very rarely the actual or only problem.

 Most turnarounds fail because they start in the wrong place. You're losing share, so you launch a new product. CAC is rising, so you shift your channel strategy. Buyers are leaving, so you run personalized offers. Each of these responses treats a symptom as a root cause. The action may temporarily improve trends, but the unaddressed structural problem will resurface - and usually creates new fractures elsewhere in the system. 

 In my experience leading turnarounds of consumer businesses ranging from $5M to $350M, the stated reason for decline is almost always a symptom that the organization has latched onto because it's external, understandable, and doesn't implicate decisions made inside the building. The real cause(s) are nearly always structural: a misalignment between positioning, product, growth model, capital allocation, and the consumer and market realities you are operating within. That misalignment accumulates quietly over years, then manifests suddenly as a performance crisis that feels like it came out of nowhere.

Here's why this distinction matters: if you diagnose a structural problem as a marketing problem, you'll apply marketing solutions - and watch them fail. Not because the marketing was bad, but because it was treating a symptom while the disease continued to progress.

Businesses and brands decline for structural reasons, but the structures break in predictable ways.

The most common pattern is what I'd call the drift problem. Your brand/product was built for a specific consumer in a specific moment, and it worked. But consumers evolved - their values shifted, their aspirations changed, their relationship with the category matured - and you didn't evolve with them. The positioning that once felt relevant now feels stale or, worse, embarrassing to the people it needs to attract. This is slow-moving and hard to see from inside the organization because your core buyers - the ones leadership talks to, surveys, and optimizes for - are still there. The problem is invisible until you look at who's not buying: the next generation of buyers who considered you and walked away.

There's an equally dangerous variant: the brand that recognizes it needs to evolve but does so in a way that contradicts its own equity. Instead of building forward from what made it distinctive, it chases relevance by borrowing codes and behaviors that feel inauthentic - to existing buyers who feel abandoned, and to new buyers who can sense when a brand is performing rather than evolving. The result is worse than stagnation. The brand loses the people who loved it without gaining the people it was trying to attract. 

The second pattern is the overextension problem. The business expanded - more SKUs, more markets, more channels, more occasions - without the demand or the budget to support the expansion. Adoptions or distribution is wide but shallow. Sales rate is slowing. For retail brands, your retailers are noticing. Marketing spend is spread across so many initiatives that none of them can make a meaningful impact anywhere. You have the appearance of scale but the economics of fragility. 

 A related but distinct pattern is what I'd call the core neglect problem. The brand chases new audiences, new occasions, or new market segments — and in doing so, stops paying attention to the buyers who are actually sustaining the business. Resources shift toward acquisition. The product, messaging, and experience begin to optimize for people who aren't buying yet at the expense of people who already are. The core audience doesn't usually leave loudly. They quietly reduce frequency, stop recommending the brand, and eventually switch. By the time the organization notices, the base has eroded to a point where the new growth can't compensate — and the brand has lost both the audience it neglected and the audience it was chasing, because the foundation it was building on has weakened underneath. 

The third pattern is the portfolio drag. Your growth is being strangled by its own product line. Legacy SKUs, features, or services that once drove volume are now declining, diluting margin, and consuming resources that should be directed toward the products that are actually working or toward new offerings that address current consumer needs. Worse, underperforming products damage your business or brand's overall perception with consumers and, for omnichannel brands, with retailers. A buyer who tries your weakest product doesn't blame the product. They blame the business or brand.

The fourth - and most insidious - is the misattribution problem. The organization believes it knows why the business, brand, or product is underperforming, but the diagnosis is wrong. They think it's a loyalty issue when it's actually a penetration issue. They think it's a media issue when it's actually a product issue. They think they're losing to a competitor when they're actually losing to their own format mix. This happens because the most available data - sales trends, share reports, competitive spend - describes what is happening but not why. The "why" requires deeper diagnostic work: decomposing demand, tracing switching behavior, testing product-market fit, stress-testing the assumptions embedded in the growth model. Most organizations don't do this work until they're already in crisis, and by then they're under pressure to act fast - which usually means acting on the wrong diagnosis.

What these patterns have in common is that none of them are marketing problems; they are business-model problems, portfolio problems, or consumer-alignment problems that show up in marketing performance because marketing is the most visible and most-measured part of the system. This is why most turnarounds don't work. They start with the visible symptom - the advertising, the packaging, the social presence - and try to fix it without addressing the structural issues that made the brand vulnerable in the first place. A new campaign on a misaligned portfolio is a new coat of paint on a cracked foundation. It might look better for a quarter, but it won't hold.

The turnarounds that actually work start somewhere different. They start by refusing to accept the problem as presented. They decompose the demand system to find where it's genuinely leaking or broken. They make hard choices about what to stop doing - which products to cut, which markets to exit, which initiatives to kill - because focus creates the conditions for any strategic move to land. Then they rebuild the core value proposition before scaling communication. Brand enters the picture last, not first. It amplifies a system that's been rebuilt to work.

This approach requires something that most organizations find uncomfortable: the willingness to look inward before looking outward, and to acknowledge that the problem might be structural before it's competitive. But in every turnaround I've led, that willingness is what separated the businesses that recovered from the ones that didn't.