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then the company as a whole can find itself in deep trouble. Yet companies cannot opt out of this situation. They cannot turn the clock back to an age when branding didn’t matter. And besides, they can grow faster than ever before through the creation of a strong brand identity. Alongside this meteoric growth in branding has emerged the sheer value of the brand itself. Take my beloved favourite BlackBerry, a company which despite following the fruit-themed success of other tech brands (Apple, Orange) has a fraction of the market share of Nokia, the market leader in volume terms. And yet the former’s brand value was assessed in 2010 as being $31 billion, by BrandZ, a company that surveys the subject and 2011 looks set to up that value more to over twice the value of the Nokia brand. So brands matter now more than ever. Perception is reality. Reality is perception.

However, branding is no longer simply a way of averting failure. It is everything. Companies live or die on the strength of their brand.

Yet despite the fact that branding is more important than at any previous time, companies are still getting it wrong. In fact, they are worse at it than ever before. Brands are failing every single day and the company executives are left scratching their heads in bafflement.

The purpose of this book is to look at a wide variety of these brand failures, and brands which have so far managed to narrowly escape death, in order to explore the various ways in which companies can get it wrong.

As the examples show, brand failure is not the preserve of one certain type of business. Global giants such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s have proved just as likely to create brand flops as smaller and younger companies with little marketing experience.

It will also become clear that companies do not learn from each other’s mistakes. In fact, the opposite seems to happen. Failure is an epidemic. It is contagious. Brands watch each other and replicate their mistakes. For instance, when the themed restaurant Planet Hollywood was still struggling to make a profit, a group of supermodels thought they should follow the formula with their own Fashion Café.

Companies are starting to suffer from ‘lemming syndrome’. They are so busy following the competition that they don’t realize when they are heading towards the cliff-edge. They see rival companies apply their brand name to new products, so they decide to do the same. They see others dive into new untested markets, so they do too.

While Coca-Cola and McDonald’s may be able to afford the odd costly branding mistake, smaller companies cannot. For them, failure can be fatal. The branding process which was once designed to protect products is now itself filled with danger. While this danger can never be completely eliminated, by learning from the bad examples of others it is at least possible to identify where the main threats lie.

Why brands fail

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away, products were responsible for the fate of a company. When a company noticed that its sales were flagging, it would come to one conclusion: its product was starting to fail. Now things have changed. Companies don’t blame the product, they blame the brand.

It isn’t the physical item sitting on the shop shelf at fault, but rather what that item represents, what it conjures up in the buyer’s mind. This shift in thinking, from product-blame to brand-blame, is therefore related to the way buyer behaviour has changed.

‘Today most products are bought, not sold,’ write Al and Laura Ries in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. ‘Branding “presells” the product or service to the user. Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things.’ Although this is true, this new focus means that perfectly good products can fail as a result of bad branding. So while branding raises the rewards, it also heightens the risks.

Scott Bedbury, Starbucks’ former vice-president of marketing, controversially admitted that ‘consumers don’t truly believe there’s a huge difference between products,’ which means brands have to establish