Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [97]
The medium was therefore becoming the message, and that message was increasingly one of failure. But boo’s downfall cannot simply be attributed to the delusional late-1990s attitude towards the internet which only hindsight has amended. Even if boo had been an offline company many of its mistakes would have been near-fatal. For instance, blowing millions of dollars on a risky launch campaign two months before the actual launch would always be a bad move.
Another mistake, ironically enough, could be put down to the company’s obsession with the brand identity itself. The marketing people were often able to overrule the technical team, particularly with regard to crucial decisions regarding the website. As a result, the company created one of the most fabulous-looking sites on the web, with the poorest functionality.
On the surface, boo was a great brand. But branding is about more than looking good. It is about fulfilling promises. The promises boo made – both to its investors and its customers – were ultimately undeliverable. And now boo’s significance is not, as was intended, that of a global brand. Rather, through its negative example, it has helped us to learn the true value of the internet for branding. It has highlighted the fact that whereas customers may require information and interaction, they want to access these benefits quickly and with minimal hassle.
That boo failed to realize that substance comes before style means that somebody, somewhere is probably still sitting at his or her computer waiting for the site’s homepage to download.
All that was left of the $120 million (£88 million) pumped into boo.com was the technology that underpinned the business. That was picked up by Dan Wagner, former head of UK-listed technology firm Bright Station, for £250,000. Since then the technology has been used to support his new business, Venda.com, a roaring success. In June 2009 Venda.com raised an additional $6 million in venture capital, no mean feat in a credit crunch. In July 2010 the company reported sales growing at 40 per cent compound and that retailers Monsoon and Accessorize had selected Venda to power their new e-commerce sites, joining such luminaries as Tesco, which chose Venda to power its online clothing store a year earlier. Wagner was complimentary about the technology. He was quoted in the Guardian newspaper saying: ‘Although we decompiled and recompiled it, the technical implementation of the boo.com platform was extremely good [...] and the reason it is good has nothing to do with the jokers at the helm.’
Lessons from boo.com
Hire the right people. ‘The wrong people were hired – too many fresh faced consultants, too few wrinkled old retailers, and far too many warring factions,’ says the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones.
Understand the importance of timing. A September launch campaign for a November launch was an inevitable waste of money.
Go for cost-effective marketing. Towards the end of boo’s lifespan the company promoted a money-off scheme. ‘By far the most effective means of advertising the scheme turned out to be not expensive online banners or newspaper advertising by emails,’ says boo co-founder Ernst Malmsten. This unsurprising realization came rather too late.
Make sure your website works. With any website, particularly one with an e-commerce facility, it is best to go for a lowest common denominator approach. In other words, make sure it works on every customer’s computer.
Appreciate that publicity works both ways. If you put your brand under the media spotlight too early, every mistake you make will be noticed. Remember that publicity is good only when it is justified. Unless you can back it up with a solid brand performance it will turn against you.
Don’t run a business with a crystal ball. Running any business can be expensive, but if your sales figures are in the thousands, you probably shouldn’t be spending millions in the hope