Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [6]
McDonald’s didn’t invent the hamburger. Facebook didn’t invent social networking. Google wasn’t the first search engine. But it’s always good branding to try and look like you were first. Early research studies on this subject were based on surveys of surviving companies and brands, excluding all the pioneers that failed. This helps some companies to look as though they were first to market even when they were not. Procter & Gamble boasts that it created America’s disposable-nappy (diaper) business. In fact, a company called Chux launched its product a quarter of a century before P&G entered the market in 1961.
Strong brands will always beat the locals. Wrong, as Nigel Hollis eloquently argues in his 2010 edition of The Global Brand, such brands gain by being a part of a local culture and can lose out if they are not.
If a product is good, it will succeed. This is blatantly untrue. In fact, good products are as likely to fail as bad products. Betamax, for instance, had better picture and audio quality than VHS video recorders. But it failed disastrously.
Brands are more likely to succeed than fail. Wrong. Brands fail every single day. According to some estimates, 80 per cent of all new products fail upon introduction, and a further 10 per cent die within five years. By launching a product you are taking a one in ten chance of long-term success. As Robert McMath, a former Procter & Gamble marketing executive, once put it: ‘it’s easier for a product to fail than it is to survive.’
Big companies will always have brand success. This myth can be dismantled with two words: New Coke. As this book will show, big companies have managed to have at least as much failure as success. No company is big enough to be immune to brand disaster. In fact, many of the examples in this book highlight one of the main paradoxes of branding – namely, that as brands get bigger and more successful, they also become more vulnerable and exposed.
Strong brands are built on advertising. Advertising can support brands, but it can’t build them from scratch. Many of the world’s biggest brand failures accompanied extremely expensive advertising campaigns.
If it’s something new, it’s going to sell. There may be a gap in the market, but it doesn’t mean it has to be filled. This lesson was learnt the hard way for RJR Nabisco Holdings when it decided to launch a ‘smokeless’ cigarette. ‘It took them a while to figure out that smokers actually like the smoke part of smoking,’ one commentator said at the time.
Strong brands protect products. This may have once been the case, but now the situation is reversed. Strong products now help to protect brands. As the cases show, the product has become the ambassador of the brand and even the slightest decrease in quality or a hint of trouble will affect the brand identity as a whole. The consumer can cause the most elaborate brand strategy to end in failure.
Why focus on failure?
The aim of this book is to provide ‘how not to’ advice by drawing on some of the largest branding blunders of all time. Brands which set sail with the help of multi-million dollar advertising campaigns shortly before sinking without trace are clear contenders. However, the book will also look at acknowledged brand mistakes made by usually successful companies such as Google, Virgin, McDonald’s, IBM, Coca-Cola, General Motors and many others.
Welcome, then, to the brand graveyard where companies have either put their flagging brand to rest or have allowed it to stagger around with no direction in a state of limbo. While these branding ‘horror stories’ may suggest that failure is inevitable, their example has helped to identify the key danger areas. It is hoped then, that this book will provide an illuminating, if rather frightening read.
Don’t have nightmares.
Chapter Two
Classic failures
Some brand