The Maturity Handoff
Research confirms what most brand decisions ignore: the message that works for a new brand actively underperforms for a mature one. The handoff has a sequence. Skipping it has a cost.
There is a predictable error inside most brand strategy engagements. A company is new, or newly repositioned, and someone in the room, usually someone who has spent time with purpose-driven brands or attended the right conferences, argues for an emotional campaign. Lead with the feeling. Show the lifestyle. Skip the product walkthrough, which is what everyone else does. The argument sounds sophisticated. It tends to win.
Six studies published this month in Behavioral Sciences suggest the argument is wrong, and wrong in a specific, measurable way. The researchers found that functional advertising appeals outperform lifestyle appeals for new brands, and that lifestyle appeals outperform functional ones for mature brands. The effect was consistent across text-only and image-text formats, and across fictitious and real brands. What you lead with should depend on where your brand sits in its lifecycle -- not on how emotionally resonant you want to sound.
That finding is not entirely surprising. But the mechanism behind it is worth understanding precisely, because it explains not just what to do but why the common mistake keeps happening.
What you lead with should depend on where your brand sits in its lifecycle -- not on how emotionally resonant you want to sound.
The Research
The study, led by researchers at Hunan Normal University and published in Behavioral Sciences in October 2026, examined how the type of advertising appeal interacts with brand maturity to affect purchase intention. The researchers defined two appeal categories: functional appeals, which emphasize product attributes, performance, and practical benefits; and lifestyle appeals, which emphasize emotional experiences and resonance with consumers' self-image. The research drew on the Elaboration Likelihood Model, a well-established framework for processing persuasive messages.
The finding that emerged across all six experiments was what the authors call a partial matching pattern. New brands benefit from functional appeals. Mature brands benefit from lifestyle appeals. The match matters because it reflects how much prior knowledge a consumer brings to the encounter.
When someone has no existing association with a brand, they have real uncertainty about what the product does and whether it delivers. A functional appeal reduces that uncertainty directly—it gives them something to evaluate. A lifestyle appeal, by contrast, seeks to activate stored brand associations that do not yet exist. It asks the consumer to feel something about a brand they have no context for. The mechanism fails because the substrate is missing.
For mature brands, the dynamic reverses. Consumers already understand what the product is and have an existing attitude toward the brand. Further information about features adds little. What lifestyle appeals can do is activate those stored associations, speak to the consumer's sense of self, and deepen the brand's position in their identity. The cognitive work has already been done. The emotional work is what is left.
Where the effect is strongest
The researchers found that the matching effect was more pronounced in image-text advertising than in text-only formats. In the text-only studies (Studies 2a and 3a), the predicted interaction between brand maturity and appeal type was either absent or weaker. When visual information was added, when the advertisement became a poster rather than a slogan, the effect became significant and consistent.
The researchers' interpretation is that visual advertising gives lifestyle appeals more to work with. Abstract emotional claims need context to land. A lifestyle slogan stripped of imagery has almost nowhere to go. Put the same claim into a designed visual environment, and the lifestyle signal can actually be transmitted. The result suggests that the maturity handoff is not just about message type—it is about the advertisement's full format, and the two interact.
The effect was also stronger when real brands replaced fictitious ones. Consumers had genuinely internalized the maturity of brands they recognized, which meant their processing of functional versus lifestyle claims worked as the model predicts. With fictitious brands, the maturity cue had to be communicated through the description, which introduced noise. The real-brand studies showed the cleanest and largest effect sizes.
Lifestyle appeals require stored associations to be activated. Run them before those associations exist, and the mechanism has nothing to work with.
The assumption the research challenges
The common error this research describes is not ignorance of research. It is an assumption baked into how brand thinking has evolved over the last two decades. Emotional storytelling became the aspirational mode. Purpose-driven campaigns became the benchmark for serious brand work. The implicit model holds that emotional resonance is always preferable to functional clarity. That functional messaging is something you graduate from rather than something you earn the right to graduate from.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model offers the corrective. When consumers are motivated and able to process a message, and they encounter an unfamiliar brand and actively try to decide whether to trust it, they take the central route. They evaluate arguments. They process information. Lifestyle appeals, which are designed to bypass that processing and work through peripheral cues, are precisely the wrong instrument for that moment. The consumer wants to evaluate, and you are giving them something to feel.
This is not an argument against emotional advertising. It is an argument for sequencing it correctly. The researchers themselves are clear that mature brands benefit significantly from lifestyle appeals. The question is not whether to use them; it is when the brand has actually earned the conditions under which they work.
Changes in brand decision-making
The practical implication is not simply 'new brands should explain themselves.' Most practitioners already know this in a general way. The sharper implication is that brand maturity should be a factor in advertising strategy decisions in the same way that audience segmentation or channel mix is—explicitly, with a named criterion, not as a vague instinct.
What does brand maturity mean operationally? The research uses market tenure and brand recognition as its proxies. A brand that has been in the market for 20 or more years and has established recognition is mature. A brand launched within three years with limited awareness is new. But the more useful question for practitioners is not age; it is whether your audience can retrieve meaningful associations when they encounter your brand. If they cannot, you are a new brand strategically regardless of how long you have existed.
A company that has operated regionally for 15 years and is entering a new market should treat the market entry as a new-brand situation. A product line extension within a category where the parent brand has deep recognition can lean on maturity effects the extension has not earned on its own. The matching logic is not a fixed property of the brand; it is a function of the relationship between that brand and a specific audience at a specific point in time.
Brand maturity is not a property of the company. It is a function of the relationship between that brand and a specific audience at a specific moment.
A pattern of partial matching
The researchers describe their finding as a pattern of partial matching. Partial, because the effect for new brands, while directionally consistent, was not symmetrical with that for mature brands. Lifestyle appeals hurt new brands less than functional appeals help them. Functional appeals depress mature brand performance more than lifestyle appeals boost it. The asymmetry suggests there may be a floor on lifestyle damage -- that even for a new brand, a lifestyle appeal that does not actively underperform is still survivable.
The more interesting gap is longitudinal. The study examines brands at a moment in time—whether new or mature—but does not track their transition. At what point does the handoff actually need to happen? Is it gradual, with a blend of functional and lifestyle elements appropriate over a middle period? Or is there a threshold of recognition and association density at which the switch becomes beneficial more quickly? The research establishes the endpoints clearly. The path between them is where the next set of decisions lives.
For practitioners, that gap is the working territory. The study tells you what to do when your brand is clearly new and when it is clearly mature. What it does not yet tell you is how to manage the handoff in real time using the instruments available within most organizations. That is a harder question -- and probably a more important one.
The right message for a new brand will underperform for a mature one. Not because the message got worse. Because the audience changed.
Chen, S., Zhang, Y., Liu, Y., Zhu, X., & Luo, X. (2026). The Impact of Advertising Appeal Types on Purchase Intentions for Brands in Different Maturity Levels. Behavioral Sciences, 16(10), 1926. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs16101926
Petty, R.E., & Cacioppo, J.T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123-205.
Rhee, E., & Jung, J.M. (2019). Brand familiarity as a moderating factor in the ad-context congruity effect on consumer responses. Journal of Business Research, 99, 361-369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.09.029
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