Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [90]
Lessons from Excite@Home
Avoid too many cooks. Hearst says:
One of the lessons is that you can gain a tremendous advantage by partnering with big, well-established companies, and people are going to continue to do that. But those companies are going to find it very difficult to put their new start-up venture ahead of their own corporate responsibilities. So when you have a start-up controlled by big, established companies, it’s going to be a little different than a real, standalone start-up.
Don’t over-reach. Excite@Home’s ambition to become the next AOL meant that it over-reached itself, spending money it couldn’t afford.
Differentiate the brand. Ultimately, consumers didn’t have a clear idea of what the Excite@Home brand stood for. It meant everything and nothing, and as a result it failed.
83 WAP
Why another protocol?
In order to gain public awareness new technologies are now promoted as brands, by technological companies and organizations. However, often those technologies that receive the most hype die an early death while those that are launched with no fanfare gain mass acceptance.
Nowhere has this been more evident than with mobile phone technology. In Europe, the major mobile phone companies were unable to anticipate the success of SMS (short messaging service) text messaging. Indeed, some even failed to mention their phones included an SMS facility. As I explored in my previous book Mobile Marketing, mobile phone users were left to discover SMS for themselves – and discover it they did. In the UK alone, over 1 billion text messages are sent and received every single month.
In Mobile Marketing, I provided an overview of the technology’s popularity:
SMS, or the Short Messaging Service, was the first mainstream technology to enable short text messages to be sent from one mobile device to another. Devoid of colour, graphics, audio, video, and confined to 160 characters per message, SMS hardly seemed the most radical of new media technologies. Furthermore, people wanting to send an SMS text message had to work with small, fiddly mobile keypads and tiny grey screens.
Yet, for all its evident shortcomings, SMS became hugely popular and has inspired a whole generation of ‘textheads’, who have even conjured up their own SMS shorthand to overcome the character limit. Even among older users, SMS text messaging has proved to be a popular, less-intrusive and often cost-effective alternative to voice calls. While the mobile companies initially ignored this unassuming technology, they were very excited indeed about another three letter acronym: WAP.
WAP (wireless application protocol) was heralded as the first major global technology to make the mobile internet a reality. And it was, although excessively slow download times and frequent connection failure along with many other usability shortcomings started to make people wonder if the wireless web would be such a great thing anyway.
In 1999, the year WAP was being tweaked for launch in many countries, not a bad word could be found about this technology. Two years later headlines such as ‘The Great WAP flop’ and ‘RIP WAP’ were not uncommon in the European technology press.
One survey conducted in summer 2001 in the UK was especially telling. The BRMB study found that of the two-thirds of the population who owned a mobile phone, 85 per cent believed they had an SMS texting facility, while only 13 per cent said they had a WAP-enabled phone. Of that small number, only 37 per cent had used the WAP facility within the last month. Therefore most of those who were aware they were using a WAP device still didn’t believe the WAP facility was worth using. As Simon Rogers commented in the Guardian at around the same time (July