As more brands than ever are facing slaughter, established brands are becoming more valuable. As a result, brands are taking new roles in consumers' lives and in society. Heritage brands face dispersed ownership and must struggle against prejudice and oblivion to take on the role of beacons in society. In this article, we investigate the hows and whys of brand management as the young brands die and the old prevail.

Killing brands is high fashion in the board rooms. As we entered the 21st century, companies competed for the heavyweight title in brand slashing. As reported in Harvard Business Review (Kumar, 2003), high-profile companies such as Diageo, the world's largest spirits company, went from 35 brands in 1999 to the present 8; the global conglomerate Unilever downsized from 1,600 brands to 400; and Procter & Gamble is shifting focus from its over 250 brands to the 10 most profitable. Marketers and financial s agree that the road to high profits is `narrow' when it comes to brands. In a study of 113 companies in Standard & Poor's Top 500 Companies Index, Rao et al. (2004) found that companies with single-brand strategies were valued much higher than companies with multiple brands.

Reducing the size of the brand portfolio is a way to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing and brand management. Using the same brand creates stability and increases predictability when it comes to new business and product launches (e.g., Rao et al., 2004). However, using the same brand also increases the company's risk (e.g., Broniarczyk & Alba, 1994). What if a new product carrying the brand name fails? The intuitive response is to rely on established, highly stable brands. These are the brands that have stood the test of time and are not easily shaken by new ventures or an inferior line extension here and there. As brands are slashed and companies focus on a small number of strong brands, the good old brands prevail.

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