A certain mindset and approach has taken over a lot of companies where they want to pull a fast one on their customers and improve margins at the same time. They rely on the brand name to keep customers coming back (because research has shown that people are less likely to try a new brand in a product space over their chosen one, "'ol reliable", even if they complain about its falling quality) while lowering the quality of that product until the brand identity is all that differentiates the product from a competitor. This makes their margins better, competing with competitors, at the expense of the quality of the product.
At least until customer perception sours. Then the brand engages in "artificial" rebranding by "returning their product to quality" and advertising it as such. A recent and famous example of this cycle was Domino's pizza, which was a stellar marketing campaign built on...their 'old' pizza sucking. Many hyper margin conscious companies rinse and repeat this cycle.