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Other Western companies have also been influenced by the Japanese approach to branding. Take Virgin, for example. Richard Branson has been famous for criticizing brands such as Mars, which refuse to attach the name to other types of products:

What I call ‘Mars Syndrome’ infects every marketing department and advertising agency in the country. They think that brands only relate to products and that there is a limited amount of stretch that is possible. They seem to have forgotten that no-one has a problem playing a Yamaha piano, having ridden a Yamaha motorbike that day, or listening to a Mitsubishi stereo in a Mitsubishi car, driving past a Mitsubishi bank.

However, among Western companies Xerox remains more typical than Virgin. Unlike Xerox, Virgin doesn’t risk brand dilution. As John Murphy, chairman of the international branding consultancy Interbrand once observed: ‘Unless they poison someone or start applying the brand to inappropriate products such as pension funds or photocopiers, I doubt whether the Virgin brand will ever be diluted.’

In 1996 Murphy had to eat his words when Virgin did start to move into pension funds. However, there is little sign that Virgin is about to compete with Xerox in the photocopier market. Even Richard Branson might have a problem reversing the intrinsic association the Xerox name has with the product it invented.

The simple fact is that most large brands are associated with one product or service offering. With Coca-Cola, it’s cola. With Levi’s, it’s blue jeans. With McDonald’s, it’s fast food. And with Xerox, it’s copiers.

Xerox was never going to be a Virgin or a Yamaha, but it still kept trying. Recognizing this fact, brand expert Jack Trout, president of Trout and Partners, advised Xerox to concentrate on what it did best. Trout realized that Xerox could remain within the copier market and still be at the forefront of technology. The solution? Laser technology. As Trout has since written about the experience:

There I was, facing a room full of technical and marketing people who were dutifully executing the office automation strategy that had been in force for years. I was the designated outside messenger bringing the bad news that all their past efforts were in vain and they should focus on the lowly laser printer instead of their glorious office machines. This was not a popular message.

Indeed, Trout soon realized that Xerox believed the future lay in another direction:

To this day, 15 years later, I have a vivid memory of an interchange that ended this meeting. After listening to my impassioned plea about laser printing, an engineer in the back of the room stood up and said that laser printing was ‘old hat’. Xerox had seen the future and it was about to be ‘ion deposition’. I asked what that was. The reply was that it was a little hard to explain to a layperson, but it was going to be fast and cheap. My response went something like this, ‘When that happens, we can move to ionography, but for now let’s jump on the laser and lasography.’

So what happened? According to Trout, ‘the room went icy cold, the sale was lost, and another prediction was pursued that never happened.’

Indeed, the strategy which followed that disastrous meeting cost Xerox billions. Although the company now seems to accept its fate as a ‘copier brand’, it spent years exploring other, profitless avenues. As a result, competitors such as Canon and IBM have made serious inroads into the copier market, with their high-speed machines. However, providing Xerox can keep its focus on copiers and direct its technological ambitions towards this narrow, but still lucrative market, it could still dominate in the future.

Lessons from Xerox

It’s vital to know who you are. Xerox’s major mistake lay in trying to transform itself into an IBM-style ‘information business’. The rest of the world kept on viewing Xerox as a company which made photocopying machines.

Nobody knows the future.