By Dina Faour, Prof. of Advertising, American University in Dubai

Resilience is the word everyone is reaching for lately. What is it made of? Can you build it, or are some brands simply born with it? How do you spot it, and what does a brand have to survive before it earns the label?

If I had to pin it down: a resilient brand knows itself well enough to bend under pressure, and stays grounded enough in its values to spring back without losing its shape. It has little to do with luck, and it is not really about dodging crises. What counts is what a brand does once one actually lands. Four things tend to be there when it works. A clear identity. Room to adapt. A horizon long enough to swallow a short-term hit. And a community that holds.

Like most lessons in marketing, this one arrives in hindsight. We watch a success, or a flop, and then go hunting for the moral. In preparing this piece I talked it through with industry friends, colleagues, and my own students, and in the end I decided to let the proven cases do the arguing. We usually go looking for resilience only once a crisis has already hit.

Take Johnson & Johnson and the Tylenol ordeal of 1982. Seven people in Chicago died after someone laced Tylenol capsules with cyanide on store shelves. Rather than protect sales, J&J pulled 31 million bottles nationwide at a cost of around 100 million dollars, told the public everything it knew, and worked openly with police and press. It then relaunched in tamper-proof packaging that became an industry standard, and won its market share back inside a year. Resilience here looks a lot like transparency: protect people first, and the long-term story looks after itself.

Then there is LEGO, in 2003 and 2004. After years of chasing growth through theme parks, clothing, and an ever-widening product line, it was close to bankruptcy, bleeding around 800 million kroner a year. New leadership stripped it back to the brick. They cut thousands of products, fixed the supply chain, and reconnected with what fans actually wanted. It took courage to admit the mistake, and humility to go back to basics, and that is exactly what carried LEGO to becoming one of the most profitable toy companies in the world.

Burberry is my favorite global story, because it reinvented itself while defending its name and that famous check. By the early 2000s the camel, black, and red pattern had spread so widely, and been counterfeited so often, that in Britain it got tied to “chav” culture and was reportedly banned by some pubs, which is close to poison for a heritage house. From 2006, under Angela Ahrendts and Christopher Bailey, Burberry pulled the check back to about ten percent of its products, cracked down on the fakes, took back its licensing, and put the trench coat at the center again. It paired all of that with an early bet on digital that made it one of the first online-first luxury brands. What makes it the better example, honestly, is that it has needed more than one comeback, and is working through yet another as I write this. Its real resilience is that repeated ability to catch itself, review, and reset.

It would be easy to stop at the winners, but a highlight reel proves almost nothing. We only call these brands resilient because they won, and hindsight is generous that way. So it is worth looking at two giants that had every advantage and fell anyway. Kodak is the cruelest one, because it invented the very thing that killed it. A Kodak engineer built the first digital camera back in 1975, and the company buried it to protect the film business, right up until digital arrived exactly as predicted and Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Nokia went a different way. At its peak it held roughly forty percent of the global mobile market, then it read the touchscreen smartphone as a passing fad rather than the ground moving under its feet, and by 2014 it was selling its handset business to Microsoft for a sliver of what the brand had once been worth. Size did not save it. Heritage did not either. The survivors were willing to change the thing that was working, and the ones that fell just protected it until it stopped working for them.

Closer to home, Aramex has been at this since the 1980s. Founded in Amman in 1982, it survived Gulf instability and the collapse of a major US partner network, then became the first Arab company to list on Nasdaq, and it kept adapting through the rise of e-commerce and one regional disruption after another. Emirates tells a version of the same story, posting a record loss during the pandemic and then a record profit not long after, and Saudi Arabia’s Almarai another, adapting hard while keeping its promise intact.

Among local brands, Careem comes to mind. Launched in Dubai in 2012, it built a genuinely regional ride-hailing brand against a far bigger rival, was acquired by Uber for 3.1 billion dollars in 2019, and then, instead of vanishing into it, grew into a super app spanning rides, delivery, and payments, drawing a 400-million-dollar investment from e& in 2023. It held on to its identity straight through the acquisition. Emaar is another: when the 2008 crisis hit Dubai’s property market, the developer behind Burj Khalifa restructured, leaned on recurring income from its malls and hospitality rather than off-plan sales alone, and rode the emirate’s recovery back to strength.

So what do global, regional, and local actually share? Resilient brands are the ones visibly committed to thriving. They are clear enough on their values and their positioning to bend when things get hard, solid enough to hold while they bend, and protective enough of their long-term vision to absorb the short-term bruises. Which takes us back to where we started. Is resilience innate or acquired? Built, I think, not born, and built earlier than we like to admit. Can you spot it in advance? Only partly, because the proof is never a good year or a clever campaign. It is the reset, and usually the second and third reset after that. And what does a brand have to show to earn the label? Not survival on its own, but survival with its identity intact, the same brand walking out the far side of the storm, only wiser.

Because here is the thing: resilience is built in the good times. When a brand is thriving, that is exactly when it should be planting its values and its culture, building a sense of belonging strong enough to hold when the weather turns. When those values run deep enough, they stop feeling like constraints and start feeling like freedom, the very thing that lets you adapt creatively under pressure. A resilient brand is never static. It keeps evolving, keeps reading the room, and quietly keeps earning its place in people’s lives.

How to keep your brand resilient: a working checklist

  • Decide what you will never trade away, and name it now, while things are calm.
  • Build belonging in the good times, so there is something to hold when they end.
  • Look for your own Kodak moment, and take it seriously even when the numbers look great.
  • Be willing to disrupt yourself before a competitor is glad to do it for you.
  • Keep enough financial and operational room that a shock stays a shock.
  • Tell the truth quickly when something goes wrong. See Tylenol.
  • Know your basics well enough to return to them under pressure. See LEGO.
  • Watch the edges of your market, while there is still time to move.
  • Do not lean on a single product, channel, or revenue line.
  • Treat the reset as routine, not an emergency. See Burberry.

For this list to make a difference, we start with the people. As my dear mentor, Dr. Lance De Masi, puts it, “resilient brands start with resilient people; These are people who have a deep sense of and appreciation for consistency that is eternal”. If there is one thing I want my students to take from all this, it is that resilience is not a rescue plan you reach for when things break. It is a habit you build while they are still whole. The brands that last are not the ones spared from storms, but the ones that know themselves well enough to walk out the other side still recognizably themselves. So build that clarity now, and think ahead, while the sun is out. The rest is just weather.