Brands under pressure

An electronics store at Hamburg Central Station. An entire shelf full of cordless vacuums. Thirteen brands: established German names, young manufacturers from China, plus the store’s own private label. I try to see the shelf through the eyes of someone buying a cordless vacuum for the first time. The devices look alike. Slim wand, display on the handle, light on the nozzle. Which one do I take?

You don’t buy a cordless vacuum every week, so your own experience doesn’t help much. So what decides? The price? The model in the middle price range? Advice at the shelf? Or the name I already know?

One thing the retailer has already decided beforehand: who gets onto the shelf at all.

Research offers some clues. When faced with many similar options, people like to put off the decision. Or they reach for the familiar. Brands lower perceived risk. They save search effort. But the brand isn’t the only shortcut. The mid-price option, the position on the shelf, the sales advice: much of this lies with the retailer.

The shelf is just one arena. Today, brands are under pressure from several sides.

Five forces

Price. Temu, Shein and Action are setting new price anchors. Much of what they sell costs only a fraction. According to a study by IW Consult for the German Retail Federation (HDE), German retail loses around €2.5 billion in sales a year to Temu and Shein alone. That makes one question louder: what exactly am I paying more for?

Retail. Private labels have long stopped being mere copies. Many are well made. According to YouGov, they now account for 47 percent of the German grocery market, up from 41 percent in 2021. In the electronics store, too, the private label stands on the shelf. And the retailer decides what goes there, and where.

Copies. A new feature rarely stays exclusive for long. Competitors follow suit, often quickly and entirely legally. Counterfeiters go further: they copy a brand’s look. According to the OECD and EUIPO, around 4.7 percent of all imports into the EU in 2021 were counterfeit. But neither copies the one thing that matters: the promise. Anyone who competes on features alone is running a race with no finish line. Innovation remains important. But it needs a brand people can attribute it to.

Community. Today, meaning is also created online. In forums, on TikTok, in comment sections. Customers help define what brands mean. That can be an opportunity: LEGO has let fans develop their own sets for years. But it can also work against the brand. Then the brand gets reinterpreted, often faster than it can respond.

Pressure from within. Raw materials are getting more expensive. Margins are shrinking. Those responsible for product management have to cut costs. Every single decision can be well justified. A cheaper ingredient. A thinner material. A little less content. Taken together, the brand can fade in the process.

One example: in early 2025, Milka reduced many of its bars from 100 to 90 grams. The packaging stayed almost the same. In the Hamburg Consumer Advice Centre’s “Deceptive Package of the Year” vote, two out of three votes went to the Alpine Milk bar. That had never happened in twelve years. Cocoa prices had risen sharply at the time. The cost pressure was real. But so was customers’ anger.

What’s new is the simultaneity

None of these forces is new on its own. Private labels have existed for decades. So have counterfeits. What’s new, in our view, is that everything is happening at once. And everything is moving faster.

One could conclude that the age of brands is over. We see it differently. It’s precisely under pressure that it becomes clear what holds a brand up. A strong brand is more than a logo on a product. It provides orientation. It creates meaning. And it keeps its promise, over many years.

What this series is about

With this series, we want to show what makes brands strong. We are not looking for a separate recipe for each force. We are asking what fundamentally keeps brands strong.

Our anchor is the brand sociology of Hamburg’s Alexander Deichsel. Its central concept is self-similarity. A brand may change. But in doing so, it must remain similar to itself.

Part 1: Changing without losing yourself. The overview. How does a brand stay recognizable when everything around it is in motion?

Part 2: Meaning. When do brands support our self-image? And why is meaning alone not enough? An answer to interchangeability.

Part 3: Self-similarity in dialogue. How change succeeds. With LEGO, Patagonia and the question of how much co-creation a brand can handle.

Part 4: When brands squander their trust. How it fails. With Afri-Cola, Bionade and Tropicana.

Excursus: Naming. What a name can do for a brand.

We work with cases. Cases don’t prove anything. They reveal patterns. In hindsight, much seems logical. That’s why opposing views get a say, too.

Why this topic matters to us

In our work at CURTH+ROTH, we research what binds people to brands. Sometimes it’s something other than what companies assume. We share these insights in this series. We look forward to the conversation, and we welcome disagreement, too.