Fortune: Intel and Toyota made perfectly logical decisions. That’s exactly how they killed their best brands

Pentium was once one of the most recognized technology brands in the world. Scion was Toyota’s most successful attempt to reach a younger generation of buyers. Both eroded over time. Neither failed because of a bad launch or weak product. Both were killed by something more insidious: a long sequence of individually rational decisions that nobody stopped to question.

In this Fortune article, Lexicon founder David Placek examines two distinct failure modes, what they have in common, and what leaders can do to avoid them.

• Why Pentium’s brand extension across seven versions over thirteen years turned a premium signal into a generic label.
• How Scion drifted form a sharply defined cultural brand into a collection of rebadged vehicles with no unifying idea.
• What Ferrari’s deliberate scarcity reveals about the relationship between contstraint and pricing power, and the brand team doesn’t get overruled.

The most dangerous brand decisions aren’t the dramatic ones. There the incremental ones that add up over time.

Read the article in Fortune or on Yahoo Finance.