Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [2]
Nowhere has this capacity to gloat been more in evidence than the fall from grace in 2010 of two of the world’s most successful brands, BP and Toyota. Both brands suffered catastrophic, though perhaps not terminal, blows to their reputations for quality, integrity and honesty. While BP successfully played corporate baddie, leaking oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Toyota and its near invisible chairman Akio Toyoda, also found themselves at the centre of a storm of unwelcome public visibility when the company had to recall a few million cars for a variety of reasons ranging from sticking accelerator pedals to steering lock defects. Both problems had initial physical causes but were made much, much worse by complacency and bad handling.
YouGov, best-known for its political and social polling, runs Brand Index (www.brandindex.com/content/default.asp), a daily measure of public perception of 850 consumer brands across 34 sectors, measured on a 7-point profile. The chart of how the BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs brands were performing over the five years to August 2010 makes for interesting viewing, but fasten your seat belt before opening this web link! (www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/08/22/
business/22metrics.html?ref=business)
Interest in failure isn’t because business people are all cold- hearted Machiavellians, ready to sneer down their cigars at the spectacular imbecility and incompetence inherent in a lot of failed brands. Or at least, it’s not just because of that. It’s chiefly because failure is the reality that faces most brand managers for much of their working life.
Some business books rabbit on about success as if it is something that can be cooked up by following a few basic instructions and adding a few basic ingredients. They don’t want to dishearten their readers by giving them the truth: a brand – any brand – is always more likely to fail than succeed. And, just for the record, this is usually the fault of the brand, not the product itself. If nothing was branded, every product within a category would stand an equal chance of success: hamburgers would just be hamburgers, running shoes would just be running shoes, dark cola-flavoured carbonated water would just be dark cola-flavoured carbonated water. So the difference between success and failure rests not with the product, but with the brand.
The moment a new brand is launched, the odds are immediately stacked against it. Each new brand either has to try to wean consumers away from its competitors, or it has the even harder task of trying to create a market all by itself. The result is that nine out of ten times brands fail. And what is more, this situation is unlikely to ever change. Indeed, in the time since this book was first published, there have been no shortage of costly brand disasters. Coca-Cola’s attempt to launch its bottled water Dasani on the UK market, only to find it included an illegal level of toxicity, is just one of the most notable recent examples of how success and expensive marketing budgets don’t always go hand in hand.
As brands become increasingly expensive to launch the stakes get greater. In most sectors, what was once simply a risky market, has now become a casino. When a brand makes it, it can become bigger than ever before, but you’ll be hard-pushed to define its success. If there was a single ingredient that guaranteed success, wouldn’t every brand be successful? After all, even the world’s most successful brand – Coca-Cola (worth $70 billion according to Interbrand) – does not know what exactly makes it so successful. If it did, it would