Richard Lomax thinks about how market research can help brands reawaken dormant loyalty.
When sales slip or relevance wanes, legacy brands often have two choices, reinvent themselves or reconnect. Ribena, a childhood favourite for many of us, has recently chosen to do the latter.
Backed by a £7m relaunch, their strategy isn’t about creating something new, it’s about reminding people why they loved the brand in the first place. Their campaign, “There’s no taste like home” taps into shared childhood memories and a sense of comfort. It’s a great example of nostalgic brand storytelling that doesn’t feel forced.
What does this tell us? Well, reconnection is as powerful as reinvention; and market research plays a critical role in helping brands rediscover what still resonates. Here’s how!
Why do consumers drift away?
Even loved brands can fall into what you might call the “memory relevance gap”; people still remember them but no longer buy them. That gap can widen slowly fuelled by changing tastes, lifestyle shifts or simply fresh competition. This is a familiar challenge for anyone trying to maintain legacy brand relevance in a fast-moving market.
Insight can help here by not just diagnosing this “drift” but exploring the emotional why. What part of the brand still holds meaning? What’s been forgotten, ignored or miscommunicated?
This is where qualitative brand research can really help to understand these subtleties. Think depth interviews, ethnography and cultural insight, not everything can be measured with a Likert scale! The goal is to find the consumer memory triggers that still hold value and emotional weight.
Nostalgia Isn’t Enough, Brand Research Reveals What Still Connects
So you’ve decided to reconnect with your audience? Easy, dust off that old packaging, dig out the Casio keyboard and re-learn that earworm of a jingle and stick a sepia filter all over your social posts. Job done? Sorry, not that easy!
Nostalgia is a feeling but only research can turn that into insight that triggers the right memories and what makes them meaningful today.
This is still where qual shines but we may look to conduct memory-led interviews, use projective techniques and sensory association tasks to help us get beyond the rational and tap into the emotional territory that builds brand affinity.
Co-creating the comeback
So you’ve understood why customers have drifted and you’ve investigated what meaningful, still relevant memories they have about your brand. Now it’s time to plan that comeback.
Online co-creation communities are a brilliant tool for this. Re-connection is a two way street and using a community allows you to test with your audience and fine-tune your creative idea or that nostalgia inspired packaging.
Online communities create a space where participants can reflect, react, and build ideas over time and not just in the moment. This makes them ideal for brand rediscovery projects, especially when emotional connection and memory are key.
Measuring Campaign Impact Beyond Sales
So, your new campaign is live, the new (old) pack has hit the shelves, you need to know if it’s working. Of course, you should track your sales, but you also need to know if the reconnection is working. Your brand tracker metrics should be helping you measure the language the consumers use to describe you, the feelings your campaign evokes; and if lapsed customers are returning!
That’s what I explored in my blog about Graze, a great example of how to combine brand tracking metrics with strategic thinking. You can read more here.
The Role of Market Research in Brand Reconnection
Ribena’s relaunch is a reminder that sometimes the most powerful way forward is to look back but with the right insight lens. The success of the Ribena brand strategy lies not in nostalgia alone, but in how that nostalgia is reinterpreted through insight.
Market research isn’t just there to understand what’s happening, it’s there to uncover what still matters, why it matters and how to make it matter again.
In a world full of data, sometimes the most powerful brand insights live in memory, and it’s our job to help brands find them.
Looking to revive a legacy brand or reconnect with lapsed customers? Let’s talk about how qualitative research and co-creation can unlock the emotional equity that still lives in your audience’s memory. Drop me an email, or connect on LinkedIn.