The best way to understand how and when to retire or kill a brand is to understand what a valuable brand should look like and then explore the warning signs that indicate when your brand is in trouble.Good brands are living entities. They change and evolve with changing market conditions so that they grow and continue to deliver value to both their owners and the consumers they serve. If a brand is fundamentally an identifiable entity that makes some specific promise of value, then the promises made by healthy brands will continually communicate and deliver significant and relevant value to consumers.

Much of today's contemporary information on branding focuses on creating new brands. The plethora of self-proclaimed branding experts like to tell us their views on the best ways to establish a brand, how to create awareness, how to help brands connect with consumers, how to position brands and how to create brand strategy so that brands enjoy strong positions in their markets.Often these experts fail to acknowledge that not all brands are strong or healthy.

Not all brands are able to successfully adjust to changing market conditions and remain relevant. Not all brands can continue to promise significant value and actually deliver that value. Not all brands continue to resonate and remain relevant in an ever-changing society. The truth of the matter is, according to research conducted by Nirmalya Kumar, professor of marketing at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland, most brands do not make money for their companies. Kumar found that year after year companies make most of their money on very few brands. Significantly less than 20% of the brands in the world deliver the majority of sales and profits.

The logical issue that arises then is not how to create and maintain a new brand, but how to navigate the much more likelyand much less enjoyable decline or death of an existing brand. How do we know when to put a brand on life support in order to nurse it back to health or allow it to fade away or actively kill it? The best way to understand how and when to retire or kill a brand is to understand what a valuable brand should look like and then explore the warning signs that indicate when your brand is in trouble.

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