Difference between 'decline' and 'decrease'

I have an advanced English student who is stuck on the word 'decline'. I told him 'decline' and 'decrease' are very similar, but are not always interchangeable. It is a business English course and we were talking about what Customer Focus means. I wanted him to say "A company needs to decrease its customer base in order to increase Customer Focus". And instead he used "decline its customer base", which is not correct (right?!).

He then used the example of "stocks declining in the last quarter" to prove that you could use 'decline' to mean 'decrease'.

Does anyone have a good rule or way of explaining when to use 'decline' vs. 'decrease'?

Solution 1:

When decline is used as a transitive verb, it means "to refuse" or "to say no to": We are declining your loan application. - I regret that I must decline your invitation. Declining a customer would be a bad business move; declining your customer base is simply ungrammatical. Probably bad business too.

When a sentient actor (a person, a corporation, an intelligent animal) is the subject of decline in an apparently intransitive sense, there is generally an implied object; I would call this a "virtually transitive" use: I offered him a job, but he declined (the job). - We offered the chimp a banana, but she declined (the banana).

When a non-sentient noun is used as the subject of decline, it means that that thing/resource/quality is becoming less, or less powerful: The puma population has been declining for the past few years. - Hari Seldon says that the Empire is declining.

When a thing is declining, or a person's health or power is declining, we can say that that thing or person is in decline. As soon as his team started losing, he went into a decline. - This country's been in decline ever since they raised the drinking age.

When decrease is used as a transitive verb, it means "to reduce the amount of": I'll have to decrease my donut intake, or else my chair will break.

Sentient actors don't decrease intransitively; you can't say He decreased.

When a non-sentient noun is used as the subject of decrease, it means that that thing/resource/quality is becoming less: The puma population has been decreasing for the past few years. but NOT Hari Seldon says that the Empire is decreasing.

A crucial difference between decline and decrease in this last case is that decline can be used to indicate a loss of power, influence, significance, etc., whereas decrease can only be used for a reduction in quantity. Thus you can say both The population is decreasing and The population is declining, but while you can say The Empire is declining, you cannot say The Empire is decreasing, since there's still only one Empire.

Solution 2:

I think the key fact is that whereas decrease is used to indicate that a quantity is becoming smaller, decline is to point to the worsening of a situation. For example, we can talk about the decline of an empire, but not about the decrease of an empire (it sounds plain weird.)

To summarize, decline and decrease are synonyms when the decrease of the quantity equate to a worsening of a situation. In your example of the customer base decreasing, that is not the situation worsening, but a deliberate decision. If the decrease of the customer base was out of the company control, one could talk about decline.