Review: Brand Failures

I managed to sit down and read a complete book Saturday...possibly the first time I've managed to read a book cover to cover in a day in years. The book is Brand Failures by Matt Haig.

I wish I could write that it was incredibly enlightening. It was definitely interesting, but it felt like a bibliography of business errors that negatively impacted brands. A few failures get two-three pages of treatment, but most are 1-1½ pages describing the problem, the failure and then a few curt lessons learned.

I think I can sum up the lessons learned as:

• If your brand is tied closely to a single product or product category, don't try to extend outside the category.
• Brand marketing history is littered with companies and brands which were over extended. Case in point: a company which had so many variants on beer, it felt the need to create Brandname Regular beer.
• A bad communications plan is the death of a brand. If there's a problem with a branded product, address it directly and forthrightly.
• If someone attacks your brand, assess the value in protecting the brand against the cost in prosecuting the person attacking the brand. It may just be more valuable to ignore the attack than to give it more publicity.
• A company comfortable with its brand is a company in decline. New products and technologies are always on the horizon. Competitors may emerge, the marketplace may change, your customers may disappear.
• Some brands deserve to die. If the company behind the brand failed to keep abreast of changing customers, markets, technologies, it may be better to allow the brand "go out of business", rather than pour company assets down sinkhold trying to keep the brand afloat.

There's 100 tales of brand failures, running the gamut from cars (GM's Oldsmobile), smokes (RJR's "smokeless" cigarettes), women (Dodge's La Femme auto from the 1950s) and song (some group named Hear'Say).

Most of the tales I'd heard, which is somewhat surprising as I'm not a marketing guy. Many of the tales are about UK companies or organizations.

It's unclear what makes these the the 100 biggest branding mistakes of all time. Ie, I don't see how the author quantified the failures (given that some are described in one-two paragraphs while others get several pages).

I was left wanting something more. Although the introduction lays out the book well, the book just ends, there's no summation of the various lessons to be learned.

One of the lessons I took away is that there is such a thing as terminal market penetration of a brand...that is, if you have, say, 45% of a market sized N and your major competitor has 45%, and it's been that way for years, you are highly unlikely to either grab the remaining 10% or a share from the competitor by changing your product, service or brand. You are far more likely to cede market share by doing so. This flies in the face of standard corporate goals of continuous improvement and ever increasing market share. There are only so many customers in a given marketplace, if you've saturated it you are better off leveraging your skills in a new marketplace, than fighting to be top dog in a mature market.

As to why I was reading Brand Failures...I'd seen a book titled Brand Pirate when we were in Tokyo in October and made a mental note to get it when we returned since it was printed in the US. On returning and surfing through Amazon, I found what I thought was that book, but the summary was nothing like what I'd read in Japan (I know, should have written down the ISBN). Brand Failures was displayed in the search results and I bought it instead. Interesting book, somewhat flawed, but interesting, probably of more value to a marketing professional than a hack like myself.

Brand Failures The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time by Matt Haig. Published by Kogan Page. ISBN: 0-7494-4433-9.