There is lots of talk about brand equity. It's an important concept that is little understood. Today, we'll talk about it in the context of your overall brand strategy. Brand equity is usually the amount of value that your brand has. It represents savings in communication expenses because a good brand pre-communicates information about your company. The brand is the character of your company. And I don't mean identity. Your company identity is just the visual representation of the brand. Brand equity usually comes up when re-branding is contemplated. Because brand equity is built up over time, you don't want to squander the value of your brand when you re-brand. That makes sense as far as it goes. When you're trying to preserve brand equity, all new brand work tries to fit in with the current brand and build on it. But, there is a situation when this doesn't make sense. If the price of trying to "work with" a brand exceeds the brand equity, then we say that your brand is totalled. Just like a car that's not worth fixing, some brands are not worth saving. This can happen in 2 situations. The most common occurs when there is a lot of work relating to a medium-value brand. Because of the volume of work, it quickly exceeds the value of the brand. Only a very strong brand can withstand the expense of a large amount of work. Another situation is when the value of the brand is almost worthless already. Even small projects quickly become expensive only for the purpose of preserving the illusion of brand equity. In all cases, the solution is to reconstruct the brand from the ground up. This destroys most of the equity, of course, but it also saves a good deal of time and money that would otherwise be tied up in "building on" that brand. In these cases, don't be afraid to give up on your brand equity. Many brands are just not worth the trouble.