Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [94]
Lesson from IBM’s Linux campaign
Think of the legal implications of any advertising campaign. Marketers should plan and consider all repercussions for any campaign. After all, court appearances rarely help to positively boost a brand identity.
87 boo.com
The party’s over
A magazine ad depicting a man vomiting into a dustbin may not be the most conventional tactic to use in order to sell sportswear, but then boo.com was hardly the most conventional company. The September 1999 advertising campaign, in which this image appeared, was designed to let everyone know that the first global sportswear site had arrived, in style, and that it was about to take the world by storm. Of course, the reality was rather different.
On 18 May 2000, less than a year after its launch, liquidators from the accounting firm KPMG were called in to the company’s London headquarters. After spending millions and attracting relatively few customers, boo.com became what The Financial Times referred to as ‘the highest profile casualty among European e-tailing start-ups’.
Although boo.com is one of the most obvious and spectacular brand failures of the dot.com era – if not all time – it was founded on reasonably secure marketing logic. As Al and Laura Ries write in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, ‘the most efficient, most productive, most useful aspect of branding is creating a new category’. There is no denying that ever since boo.com’s Swedish founders Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander had visited Amazon in 1997, they believed this was the key to dot.com success. As Malmsten writes in the best-selling account of the boo phenomenon, boo hoo:
If we were really to achieve the global impact we hoped for then we had to exploit ‘first mover’ advantage. If you’re first, then you achieve vital recognition as you become identified with whatever you’re selling. You get a lot of free publicity and customer confidence because you’re the leader. It’s then very difficult for the second wave to compete. Amazon.com was a shining example of that. Here was a company that spent almost nothing on marketing before its IPO, but still managed to create one of the best known brands in the world.
When boo.com became public knowledge in May 1999, via an article in The Financial Times, Kasja Leander announced the company in these terms: ‘Sportswear is an international market and there are a lot of people in Europe who read about products in US magazines but can’t go over to buy them. This is one of the few sectors of Internet retailing that no one’s done on a large scale and we want boo to be the number one brand.’
So neither Malmsten nor Leander can be accused of ignoring branding. The idea, from the start, was to create a ‘fully branded shopping experience on the net,’ an online equivalent of high fashion department stores such as London’s Harvey Nichols or New York’s Bloomingdales, only with the main focus on urban and sportswear from hip brands such as Adidas, New Balance and North Face.
However, the brand that really mattered was boo itself. As Malmsten has explained, the aim was to make ‘the name of the store itself as significant as anything you could buy in it’. Again, this displays solid brand-thinking, and marked boo apart from many other dot.coms that had sprung from the minds of technologists. But the problem was that whatever it can represent, the internet is technology.
If you are going to create what Malmsten referred to as ‘a gateway to world cool’ (as quoted in a June 2000 Industry Standard article), you need software to make sure people can access the gateway in the first place. In other words, your website has to work.
On the first day of its eventual launch,