Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [3]
While people try in vain to look for the holy grail marked ‘success’, brands keep dropping out of the market – or, in some cases, the market drops out from underneath them (the latest casualties are set to be soaps, according to my morning newspaper, as we increasingly choose to mask our scent with facial cleansers and shower gels).
However, while success is hard to define, failure is always easy to understand. Just as a quick post-mortem will quickly explain the cause of someone’s death (while theologians and biologists are still debating the meaning of life), so too a look at some of the most spectacular brand flops can uncover some very obvious reasons for failures.
And eight years ago, when I set about researching the first edition of this ‘how-not-to’ book, that was my intention – to look at brands that have been strangled at birth. Or, in the cases of those failures still with us – those brands that should have been strangled at birth. I wanted to write a book that would help focus attention on what can go wrong, rather than what might one day go right. My aim was to encourage brands to be neurotics, rather than over-optimistic egomaniacs, and to always consider the consequences – both financial and social – of corporate arrogance. The recent credit crunch was too good an opportunity to miss, so I have included a couple of recent examples of mighty brands being stopped in their tracks.
But don’t worry. Brand failures will keep on happening. The paradox is that success makes failure more likely because it gives brands bigger egos. ‘Hey, people like our range of fizzy drinks so they’ll just love wearing our tank-tops!’ That is why the biggest successes – such as Google, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola – can’t help producing epic failures.
So one thing seems certain, while brands may come and go, failure remains eternal... Now, can I interest any of you in buying my latest range of uber-hip Brand Failures T-shirts?
Chapter One
Introduction
The process of branding was developed to protect products from failure. This is easy to see if we trace this process back to its 19th-century origins. In the 1880s, companies such as Campbell’s, Heinz and Quaker Oats were growing ever more concerned about the consumer’s reaction to mass-produced products. Brand identities were designed not only to help these products stand out, but also to reassure a public anxious about the whole concept of factory-produced goods.
By adding a ‘human’ element to the product, branding put the 19th-century shoppers’ minds at rest. They may have once placed their trust in their friendly shopkeeper, but now they could place it in the brands themselves, and the smiling faces of Uncle Ben or Aunt Jemima which beamed down from the shop shelves.
The failure of mass-produced items that the factory owners had dreaded never happened. The brands had saved the day.
Fast-forward to the 21st century and a different picture emerges. Now it is the brands themselves that are in trouble. They have become a victim of their own success. If a product fails, it’s the brand that’s at fault.
They may have helped companies such as McDonald’s, Nike, Coca-Cola and Microsoft build global empires, but brands have also transformed the process of marketing into one of perception-building. That is to say, image is now everything. Consumers make buying decisions based around the perception of the brand rather than the reality of the product. While this means brands can become more valuable than their physical assets, it also means they can lose this value overnight. After all, perception is a fragile thing.
If the brand image becomes tarnished through a media scandal or controversial incident or even a rumour spread via the internet,