Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
24 August 2026
The Essentials
The product that built a brand is not necessarily the product that should carry its future. A historic reference can become less profitable, age the company’s image, slow innovation or cannibalise more promising offers while remaining almost untouchable because it represents part of the organisation’s identity. The difficulty begins when attachment to the past prevents rational strategic decisions. Removing an icon can be risky, but keeping it indefinitely can be even more damaging. A mature brand therefore needs to distinguish what genuinely belongs to its identity from what is simply a product it has become accustomed to protecting.
Some strategic decisions are difficult because the numbers are uncertain. Others are difficult because the numbers are perfectly clear and nobody wants to accept what they imply. Historic products often fall into the second category, because their value rarely stops at revenue, margin or market share. They carry memories of the company’s early years, successful campaigns, loyal customers and sometimes an entire period during which the brand established its legitimacy.
That emotional capital can be extremely valuable, but it can also distort judgement. Once a product has become symbolic, questioning its future can feel like questioning the brand itself, even when the commercial case for keeping it has weakened considerably. An organisation then starts protecting a reference because of what it represented rather than because of what it still contributes.
The real strategic question is therefore not whether heritage matters. It clearly does. The question is whether the company still knows the difference between preserving its history and allowing that history to determine its future.
A Historic Product Can Become an Emotional Asset and an Economic Weakness
The first warning sign appears when the symbolic value of the product becomes disconnected from its economic value. A reference may still enjoy strong recognition, a loyal customer base and an important place in the public imagination while generating increasingly weak margins, requiring complex production or consuming resources that could support more promising parts of the portfolio. The product survives because nobody wants to be responsible for removing something everyone recognises.
That situation becomes more problematic when the product starts affecting the rest of the range. A newer offer may be more profitable, better aligned with current demand or more coherent with the company’s future positioning, yet remain permanently overshadowed by the historic reference. Marketing budgets continue to support the icon because it is easier to sell, distributors continue to promote what customers already know and internal teams continue to organise themselves around yesterday’s success.
The result is not always visible in declining sales. A historic product can still perform reasonably well while limiting the performance of everything around it. It may attract customers toward a less profitable offer, reduce room for premiumisation, delay investment in innovation or make the company reluctant to change its commercial model because too much of the existing structure has been built around one familiar reference.
That is why the most dangerous historic products are not necessarily failing products. Some become strategic liabilities precisely because they remain successful enough to discourage the organisation from moving on.
An Icon Can Make the Entire Brand Look Older Than It Is
The problem is not only financial. A historic product can also lock the perception of the company into a period that no longer reflects what the business is trying to become. A brand may invest heavily in innovation, redesign its visual identity, develop new services and change its commercial ambition while the public continues to associate it primarily with a product launched twenty or thirty years earlier.
Recognition is valuable until it becomes restrictive. If the reference carries codes, usages, pricing or cultural associations that belong to another era, the rest of the organisation may struggle to escape them. New products are then evaluated through the lens of the old one, while customers continue to describe the brand using a vocabulary the company itself is trying to leave behind.
This tension becomes particularly strong when management wants to reach a different audience. The historic product may still satisfy existing customers perfectly while sending a signal that discourages younger consumers, higher-value segments or new professional buyers from considering the brand. In that situation, the company can find itself preserving loyalty among the people it already knows while weakening its ability to attract those who would determine the next stage of growth.
A brand therefore has to decide whether the product is still carrying its identity or whether it has started to trap that identity inside a version of the company that no longer exists.
Customer Loyalty Can Become a Form of Strategic Captivity
Companies are often reluctant to remove a historic reference because they anticipate customer backlash, and that fear is not irrational. Some products generate a level of attachment that goes far beyond functional satisfaction. Customers associate them with habits, memories or a period of their lives, which means that even a minor modification can provoke reactions that appear disproportionate when viewed purely through commercial logic.
The difficulty is that the most vocal customers are not always representative of the market the company needs to build next. A loyal existing audience can be extremely valuable while still pushing the organisation toward increasingly conservative decisions, particularly when every attempt at modernisation is interpreted as abandoning what made the brand successful in the first place.
This creates a genuine strategic conflict. Listening to customers remains essential, but allowing the current customer base to veto every evolution can gradually make the company less relevant to those who are not yet buying from it. The brand may then protect a shrinking centre of loyalty while losing the possibility of creating new forms of preference elsewhere.
The challenge is therefore not to ignore loyal customers, but to understand what exactly they are loyal to. Sometimes it is the product itself. In other cases, it is the reassurance, quality, familiarity or status the product represented, and those values can potentially survive even if the original reference does not.
Removing a Product Does Not Mean Erasing It
Strategic courage does not require abruptly killing a product as soon as its margin declines. Between preserving a reference unchanged and eliminating it completely, companies have several options, and the right decision often lies somewhere in between.
A historic product can be repositioned, simplified, moved upmarket, transformed into a heritage edition or distributed more selectively. A company can deliberately reduce volumes while preserving the symbolic presence of the product, allowing it to continue carrying part of the brand’s history without forcing it to remain the commercial centre of the portfolio.
In other cases, a progressive withdrawal may be more effective than a sudden stop. Reducing marketing support, narrowing the range, changing distribution and gradually directing customers toward alternatives can give the market time to adapt while allowing newer offers to build their own legitimacy. The objective is not necessarily to make the old product disappear immediately, but to stop allowing it to dominate every decision.
For companies looking to rethink a portfolio or positioning without sacrificing what genuinely creates brand value, the real work therefore consists of separating heritage from dependency. A product can remain part of the story without remaining responsible for the future.
An Icon Becomes a Problem When It Prevents Rational Decisions
There is no universal threshold at which a historic product should disappear. Some references remain highly profitable for decades, continue to express the brand perfectly and provide a powerful platform for innovation around them. Removing those products simply because they are old would be as irrational as keeping every historic reference indefinitely.
A more useful question is whether the company would choose to launch the product today if it did not already exist. If the answer is yes, its continued presence is easy to justify. If the answer is no, management needs to understand why it is still there and whether that reason remains strategic.
Perhaps the product still generates strong cash flow, attracts customers into the wider range or supports recognition in a category where visibility is difficult to rebuild. Those are legitimate reasons. But if the real explanation is that nobody wants to trigger internal conflict, disappoint long-standing customers or become the executive associated with killing an icon, then the company has moved away from strategy and into institutional hesitation.
At that point, the product is no longer simply being managed by the organisation. It is beginning to manage the organisation itself.
A Brand Should Be Able to Survive Its Own Products
Companies that last do not remain identical to themselves. They change product ranges, abandon activities, transform business models and sometimes let go of products that once defined their entire public identity. The difficult part is not preserving everything. It is understanding what actually deserves to survive.
A brand is not simply a catalogue of references. It is a reputation, a promise, a set of codes, a relationship with a market and an ability to create preference. If removing one historic product causes all of that to collapse, the deeper problem may be that the brand never succeeded in becoming larger than the product that created it.
This is why killing an icon is not necessarily an act of disrespect toward the company’s history. It can be the opposite: acknowledging what the product achieved while refusing to force it to carry responsibilities it can no longer fulfil. Heritage deserves to be preserved when it creates value, not when it becomes an excuse for strategic immobility.
A product can build a brand without needing to survive forever. The real strength of the brand appears when it knows what should remain after the product itself is gone.
We support companies that want to rethink their positioning, offer and commercial strategy when their portfolio no longer matches where the business needs to go.
Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
24 August 2026
