Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [98]
Don’t spread yourself too thin. One of the main factors that contributed to boo’s speedy demise was the decision to launch in 18 different countries simultaneously. A similar advertising campaign and identical website for each national market may have seemed like a good way to unify a global brand identity, but this costly and misguided strategy has subsequently become the archetypal ‘how not to’ example for businesses seeking to attract global audiences.
Even great investors can’t make brand style in brand substance. Initial investors included Europt@web and 21 Investmenti, a private fund controlled by clothing maker Benetton Group. They were followed by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy.
88 Google
Google? In a book about failure? Hang on a minute?
But wait, no-one, not even the most high-profile tech brand on the planet, can claim immunity from failure.
The Google story is well known enough today for a couple of brush strokes to set the scene. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1996 and began to collaborate on a search engine they called BackRub search, a name they quickly ditched in favour of Google – a play on the word ‘googol’, a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros which in turn reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
Fast forward to August 1998 and Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a cheque for $100,000 to an entity only half born called Google Inc. After a few months operating out of a garage it moves to new premises at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto with eight employees in June 1999 and in September they raise $25 million in second round venture capital from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, putting fabled VC veterans John Doerr and Michael Moritz on the board.
The rest, as they say, is history, save for a couple of less well-known facts. Firstly, just before the launch Page and Brin had a slight wobble and were tempted to sell the whole idea out for $750,000 (See Excite@Home, earlier in this chapter). Secondly, many of Google’s latest brand launches have bombed. Of their two dozen new product launches in the four years to 2006 including Google Talk, Google Finance and Gmail, only the latter looks like becoming a serious players. Even that ranked a poor third in 2010. In August 2010 Google pulled the plug on Google Wave, a flagship service that billed only a year earlier as the next generation of e-mail. Google’s strategy of launching early often means that glitches are accepted; but its aim is to encourage its geeks to take risks and stay creative, knowing that the pay-off when it gets a winner will be colossal. The company managed to keep profits growing by a modest 3 per cent during the 2008–10 recession largely by virtue of cutting costs. Out went bottled water, cafeteria opening hours were trimmed back and the practice of those working late taking the dinner provided in the office to eat at home later was discouraged. Afternoon tea on Tuesdays for all and sundry was suspended though to keep morale up the company stated that there may be occasional surprise ‘snack attacks’ in the future.
Lessons from Google
Money talks. Google is the world’s most valuable brand and its reputation for innovation and speed is more important than having a few failures on its hands. That is as long as the failures do little or no harm to consumers other than raising the hopes of a few geeks.
Lock your failures out of sight. Google runs a corporate venturing fund of its own, Google Ventures. It backs companies that have the potential to make a global impact in sectors that include consumer internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, biotechnology and healthcare. One company it has partly financed, 23andMe, a genetics start up in Silicon Valley, aims to provide the rich and famous with information on their