An Analysis of Product Deletion Scenarios George J. Avlonitis, Susan J. Hart, and Nikolaos X. Tzokas Despite a flurry of attention during the early 1980s and the occasional article thereafter, product deletion continues to suffer from neglect, which is surprising given its role in aiding processes of innovation and change that are central to competitive survival. The aim of this article is to rejuvenate research interest in this field. In doing so, we review and organize the relevant literature in three key sets of factors and postulate that their interplay delineates the product deletion scenarios followed by a company. On the basis of this argument, we develop a typology of product deletions and outline how it increases our knowledge of this critical issue and leads to useful research directions. © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. Introduction M ore than 10 years ago Tushman and Nadler [43] postulated that “there is no executive task more vital and demanding than that of sustained management of innovation and change...to compete in this ever-changing environment, compa- nies must create new products, services, and pro- cesses; to dominate, they must adopt innovation as a way of corporate life” (p. 74). In today’s business environment of accelerating technological change, the decision to innovate and change is much too often accompanied by decisions to abandon existing prac- tices and products [41], so as to give way to new methods and product players in the market place. According to Vyas [45], product deletion is a critical part of the overall product policy and management of the firm. Research has demonstrated that deletion or replacement of a product presents managerial chal- lenges to the firm of equal importance to the creation or adoption of a new product [3,5,6,11,16,40,41]. However, despite considerable research attention during the early 1980s, the theoretical development of this field of study remains embryonic. Compared to the area of new product development where typologies have been developed for assisting management in their quest for innovation and change [15–19] or even how to phase in new products while phasing out old ones [41], managers wishing to employ the best method for deleting an existing product are faced with a somewhat incohesive body of literature. For example, although the decision to delete a product is often treated as a strategy for mature or declining products, empirical evidence points to a variety circumstance that cause a company to evaluate a product with a view to its withdrawal; how the decision is best handled in each set of circumstances is far from clear in current work [2,8,24,28,40,41,45]. That said, it is logically appeal- ing to suggest that the way managers make and im- plement the product deletion decision varies, depend- ing, among other things, on the circumstances that provoked the deletion to be considered in the first place. Although compared to new product development, the deletion of products that have served their time usefully is probably less appealing to managers, a useful aid to this decision would be the classification Address correspondence to Susan Hart, Department of Marketing, University of Strathclyde, Stenhouse Building, 173 Cathedral Street, Glas- gow G4 0RQ, Scotland, United Kingdom. E-mail: susan.hart@strath.ac.uk  J PROD INNOV MANAG 2000;17:41–56 © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. 0737-6782/00/$–see front matter 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010 PII S0737-6782(99)00010-7