Why Brands Lose Relevance in Markets They’ve Already Entered.

A recent decision by Jubilant FoodWorks to exit its Dunkin' franchise agreement in India sends a clear signal to executives managing international brands.

After more than a decade in the market, the business contributes less than one percent of the operator’s revenue and has remained loss-making, leading to a phased withdrawal by the end of 2026.

This outcome is often framed as a market entry failure. It is better understood as a loss of relevance over time. Brands can enter successfully, achieve early visibility, and still fail to sustain a role as consumer behavior, pricing expectations, and competitive standards evolve.

The issue is not access to the market; it is whether the brand continues to align with how that market actually functions once it is in it.

How a Global Brand Loses Its Relevance in a New Market

Early signals in India pointed less to failed entry and more to an unresolved role.

When Dunkin’ entered New Delhi in 2012, it came in broad. The menu extended well beyond its core into sandwiches, beverages, and localized items, with more than half adapted to local tastes rather than anchored in the original proposition.

The positioning targeted urban consumers with irregular schedules, framing the brand as an all-day option rather than a specific-occasion choice.

This approach typically improves early access. Localization increases familiarity and reduces friction at first contact, which can drive trial across a wider audience, but it does not establish repeat behavior on its own.

In India, food and beverage occasions are structured and stable. Tea accounts for roughly 80% of non-alcoholic beverage consumption, while coffee remains concentrated in urban segments where chains like Café Coffee Day and Starbucks have already defined pricing, format, and usage patterns. These patterns shape the frequency and purpose of visits in ways that change slowly.

Dunkin' India's menu expansion did not clarify when to choose the brand. It introduced multiple possible use cases without securing any one of them, increasing the effort required to make a decision at the point of purchase. More options did not translate into a clearer role because increased choice changes how decisions get made at the moment of use.

In behavioral terms, this falls within what Barry Schwartz formalized as the “paradox of choice”: as the number of options increases, decision effort rises, confidence in the choice falls, and the likelihood of deferring to or defaulting to a known alternative increases. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper demonstrated this experimentally in 2000, showing that larger assortments attract attention but reduce conversion because consumers struggle to resolve their decisions.

Within that context, expanding the menu did not clarify when to choose the brand. It introduced multiple possible use cases without securing any one of them, increasing the effort required to make a decision at the point of purchase. More options did not translate into a clearer role.

The issue was not whether the brand adapted because it did. The issue was whether those adaptations narrowed into a repeatable use case that fit into existing routines or replaced them, and whether that understanding was updated as behavior shifted.

Consumer behavior does not settle after launch. It moves with income, urbanization, competition, and exposure to new formats, which means any initial read of the market quickly degrades and requires correction through continued observation. Treating market research as a one-time exercise leaves the brand optimizing against conditions that no longer exist.

Without that ongoing adjustment, the offer stays broad while the category sharpens, and the gap shows up in one place: people try it, then go back to what already fits their day.

The Domino’s Comparison: Same Market, Same Operator, Different Trajectory

The more useful comparison is not across markets, but within the same one.

Jubilant FoodWorks operates both Dunkin' and Domino's in India. Over the same period, one brand has contracted while the other has scaled into one of the largest quick-service networks in the country, with more than 2,300 stores and sustained double-digit growth in recent years.

Many of the variables typically used to explain market outcomes remained broadly consistent. The operator brought the same capabilities, the market offered similar macro conditions, and the category itself does not account for the divergence, as pizza is no more inherently local than donuts.

The difference lies in how each brand approached the question of fit, and how that fit was sustained as the market evolved.

Domino’s did not extend its existing model into India with incremental adjustments. It rebuilt around how people eat, how frequently they order, and what they expect from convenience-led dining. Menu design, pricing architecture, delivery infrastructure, and portioning were aligned to Indian consumption patterns and refined over time as those patterns shifted. Relevance was not treated as an entry assumption, but as an outcome that required continual reinforcement through alignment with behavior.

This is what scale reflects in practice: not simply distribution, but frequency and repeat usage.

Dunkin’ adapted its menu, while Domino’s adapted its model, and these are not equivalent moves. One increases accessibility at the margin, while the other embeds the brand into everyday consumption, creating the conditions for habitual use and sustained growth.

How Brands Stay Relevant

Brands do not become irrelevant because of a single bad decision. They lose relevance when the business continues to operate under a consumer profile that no longer exists. Routines shift, trade-offs change, alternatives improve, and over time, the consumer moves on, often without announcing it.

That is not a branding problem - it is an information problem. Most organizations are not short on data - they track awareness, satisfaction, and a growing set of dashboard metrics that create the impression of visibility. What they lack is a clear view of behavior. Those measures rarely explain what matters: when people buy, what they compare you with, what they are willing to pay for, what they tolerate, and what causes them to stop choosing you.

Relevance is not established through visibility; it is established through participation in real behavior.

The more useful question is not whether consumers like the brand, but where it fits into their lives under real constraints and next to real alternatives. When does the category enter the day, what else is available in that moment, and what drives the decision between options? Price, portion, convenience, taste, habit, speed, and fatigue all shape that choice, and the weighting of those factors changes by occasion. These considerations determine frequency, margin, repeat purchase, and whether expansion creates demand or simply adds locations.

Research and Relevance

Understanding the answers to those key questions requires market research that reflects how decisions are actually made.

Ethnographic observation and in-context interviews show how people behave when they are not translating their lives into survey language. Quantitative modeling indicates whether those patterns hold at scale and how they vary across regions, income levels, and segments. Sensory and product testing remain critical because repeat use is often decided by details that are routinely under-measured, including taste, texture, portion size, packaging, temperature, and whether the product still feels worth it after repeated use. No single method is sufficient on its own, but together they provide a working model of how the market functions.

Without that model, brands adapt late, mistake noise for signal, substitute activity for judgment, and treat declining relevance as a communications issue because communications are easier to change than the operating model. In practice, the issue is rarely messaging; it is whether the offer still fits how people live.

Maintaining relevance depends on a small number of decisions, made continuously rather than once. The first is defining the role the brand plays within the market, not as a translation of global positioning, but as a clear function within specific consumption occasions. Breakfast on the commute operates under different constraints than late-night delivery, and a premium treat follows different rules than an everyday purchase. When that role is unclear, visibility increases without use, and the brand remains present but unnecessary.

The second is whether the operating model fits behavior. Menu innovation can drive trial, but frequency is determined by price, access, format, delivery, portioning, speed, and consistency, along with the small frictions that either integrate into a routine or get edited out of it. If those mechanics do not align with how people already behave, the brand becomes an occasional option rather than a habitual one.

The third is what the business chooses to measure. Scale is not the same as relevance, awareness is not the same as demand, and store count is not the same as participation in daily behavior. More reliable indicators include repeat purchase, share of consumption occasions, switching patterns, and the language consumers use when they describe the brand without prompting. That language is often precise, and it tends to reveal when consumers no longer understand what a brand is for.

Building a System for Ongoing Consumer Understanding

Market entry is typically treated as a phase, and consumer understanding is often treated the same way, concentrated upfront and revisited once performance starts to soften. That approach assumes a stable market, which is rarely the case. Urbanization shifts routines, digital ordering resets expectations, income pressure reshapes value, and competitors continually redefine benchmarks. Behavior can diverge significantly across regions within the same country, to the point where averages stop being useful for decision-making.

Brands that remain relevant do not treat research as an occasional validation exercise. They embed it into pricing, product development, store formats, service design, delivery decisions, and communication. They continuously update their understanding and allow it to inform decisions before decline becomes visible in the numbers. Where that system is absent, the gap between the brand and the market widens gradually. The brand does not collapse, but it becomes easier to skip; growth slows; recovery becomes more expensive; and the organization starts explaining the market rather than responding to it.

Markets do not reject brands outright. They test them, incorporate what fits, and move past what does not. Relevance is not declared in the strategy or secured at entry. It is maintained through consistent alignment with behavior, and once that alignment breaks, the decline tends to be gradual, predictable, and difficult to reverse.

For brands operating across multiple markets, this is not a one-off exercise. Relevance depends on continuously understanding how behavior differs by market and how it evolves over time.

Kadence International works with brands at both stages, supporting market entry and, more critically, helping them stay relevant by grounding decisions in real consumer behavior through a combination of qualitative, quantitative, and in-context research.