Brand Failures

102 Brand failures
can move to ionography, but for now let’s jump on the laser and
lasography.’
So what happened According to Trout, ‘the room went icy cold, the sale was
lost, and another prediction was pursued that never happened.’
Indeed, the strategy which followed that disastrous meeting cost Xerox
billions. Although the company now seems to accept its fate as a ‘copier
brand’, it spent years exploring other, profitless avenues. As a result, competitors
such as Canon and IBM have made serious inroads into the copier
market, with their high-speed machines. However, providing Xerox can keep
its focus on copiers and direct its technological ambitions towards this
narrow, but still lucrative market, it could still dominate in the future.
Lessons from Xerox
It’s vital to know who you are. Xerox’s major mistake lay in trying to
transform itself into an IBM-style ‘information business’. The rest of the
world kept on viewing Xerox as a company which made photocopying
machines.
Nobody knows the future. George Orwell’s novel 1984 tells us more about
the period it was written in than the year 1984. Likewise, future business
and technological predictions rarely come true. For instance, no-one
predicted the rise of SMS text messaging on mobile phones. Xerox spent
too much time and energy looking into a future which didn’t exist.
Brands are bigger than products. ‘The most valuable asset of the US $19.5
billion Xerox Corporation is the Xerox name itself,’ says Al Ries. That
name, however, is exclusively and historically associated with copier
machines. It doesn’t matter that Xerox PARC has come up with some of
the most significant technological developments in computing, such as the
invention of the mouse. All that matters is the association of the brand
name in the consumer’s mind.