MT450 Unit 9 Pen Brand Revitalization Strategy Example

Restore, Promise, Teach: An MT450 Unit 9 Revitalization Strategy for an Aging Fountain Pen Brand

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT450: Brand Management Strategy

Unit 9 Brand Revitalization Strategy

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Tremont Pen Company, its owners, its costs and the schools are composite; the sources cited are real.

Diagnosis

Tremont, the Model 40 brand whose evidence fills Units 2 through 8, is not damaged; it is tired. No recall, scandal or failure has hurt it. The evidence from earlier units shows a brand that is aging with its customers.

Registration records show the median age of owners registering a new pen rising from 51 in 2015 to 57 in 2025. The Unit 3 survey found "grandfather's pen" rated plus 1.7 by buyers over fifty and minus 1.2 by buyers under thirty-five. Messy filling appeared in 34 percent of reviews coded in Unit 2, about a third. And the factory nib service, which Unit 3 rated highest on both favorability and uniqueness, is linked to Tremont by only 18 percent of pen buyers.

Three Kinds of Cause

The strategy sorts these findings into three kinds of cause, because a strategy that fixed only one would leave two in place.

What has faded: the brand's relevance to daily writing. Tremont is still known, but younger buyers see it as a pen for someone else's era, and its heritage, once a reason to buy, now reads as distance.

What has turned negative: messy filling, a product problem that has become part of the brand's image, and grandfather's pen among younger buyers, an association that is positive for one group and negative for the next.

What was never communicated: the nib service. The company has offered it for decades and mentioned it on three touchpoints. It did not fade; it was never built.

The Framework

Keller (1999) describes two broad routes to revitalizing a brand: expanding the depth and breadth of awareness, often by finding new users or new uses, and improving the image by restoring lost sources of equity or building new ones. Restoring lost equity suits the faded relevance, repairing image suits the negative associations, and building new equity suits the nib service. Each of the three moves below maps to one route.

Move One: Factory-Restored Pens

Tremont will buy back used Model 40s from owners at $35 in credit toward a new pen, restore them at the Fort Wayne service bench and sell them at $109 with a new nib and the full lifetime service promise. The bench, which handled about 4,100 service items last year against capacity of about 9,000, can restore about 2,400 pens a year at roughly $38 each in labor and parts.

This move builds new equity from the nib service by making it the product: every restored pen is proof that a Tremont can be kept indefinitely. It also reframes grandfather's pen. For younger buyers who value secondhand and repaired goods, a pen with a previous owner and a factory restoration is not someone else's pen but evidence that the brand lasts.

A restored pen turns the association younger buyers dislike into the proof of the one they value.

Cost: about $91,000 a year in bench labor and parts, offset by restored-pen revenue. Unit 8 measures: registrations per pen sold among buyers under thirty-five, and the nib service association.

Move Two: A First-Fill Promise

Every new Tremont will ship with six cartridges, a one-page filling card and a promise: if the pen does not write cleanly in its first thirty days, the owner can send it back at Tremont's expense for adjustment or exchange. A fine-flow nib option, which lays down less ink and dries faster on journal paper, will be added for daily writers.

This move repairs the negative association at its source rather than arguing against it. A promise of clean filling in advertising would only remind buyers of the problem; a box that removes the problem changes the experience reviews describe.

Cost: about $1.40 a pen in box contents, roughly $25,000 a year at current volume, plus returns, estimated at under 2 percent of pens. Unit 8 measures: the writing performance rating, and messy filling's share of coded reviews, rechecked yearly.

Move Three: A Lettering-School Program

Tremont will partner with thirty art schools, design programs and lettering workshops to fit students with Tremont Studio pens at a 40 percent discount, with a short session at each school on nib choice, filling and the service promise.

This move expands awareness among new users through a use the brand has never addressed: lettering and hand-drawn design, where fountain pens are valued for line variation. It puts the brand into younger hands through teachers they trust, not through advertising.

Cost: about $48,000 a year in discounts, travel and sessions. Unit 8 measures: unaided recall and attachment among buyers under thirty-five.

How the Moves Work Together

The three moves are designed to reinforce one another rather than run as separate projects. Students fitted through the lettering program learn about the nib service in their first session, and some will buy a restored Model 40 as their second pen, the price point most students can reach. The first-fill promise protects all three groups of new buyers from the experience that most often turns into a bad review. Restored pens, in turn, give the lettering sessions a story to tell: an instructor can hand round a pen first sold in 1987, rebuilt in Fort Wayne, writing as well as a new one. Together they move the brand toward younger buyers through use and evidence rather than through a message about being younger.

What the Strategy Refuses to Do

Three things are ruled out. First, no new logo or box: the Unit 6 reflection found that shop owners report customers asking for the green box with the gold nib by sight, and Walsh et al. (2010) found that loyal customers, more than casual ones, tend to think less of a brand after its logo is redesigned. Second, no paid influencer campaign: the brand's strongest associations travel between owners, and bought endorsements would sit poorly beside a service built on trust. Third, no cheap sealed pen: the Unit 7 proposal showed that a $29 pen would break the promise the strategy is built on.

Scorecard and Time Frame

The strategy runs for three years, 2027 through 2029, with targets on the Unit 8 grid: the nib service association rising from 18 to 27 percent by 2029, messy filling falling from 34 to under 20 percent of coded reviews, and registrations per pen among buyers under thirty-five rising from 0.22 to 0.30. Keller and Swaminathan (2020) note that brand images change slowly and that revitalization needs patience measured in years; the scorecard is reviewed every six months, but no move is abandoned before its second year unless a measure crosses its Unit 8 warning line.

References

Keller, K. L. (1999). Managing brands for the long run: Brand reinforcement and revitalization strategies. California Management Review, 41(3), 102-124. https://doi.org/10.2307/41165999

Keller, K. L., & Swaminathan, V. (2020). Strategic brand management: Building, measuring, and managing brand equity (5th ed.). Pearson.

Walsh, M. F., Winterich, K. P., & Mittal, V. (2010). Do logo redesigns help or hurt your brand? The role of brand commitment. Journal of Product & Brand Management, 19(2), 76-84. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610421011033421