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Brand Failures

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238 <strong>Brand</strong> failures<br />

Lessons from Excite@Home<br />

Avoid too many cooks. Hearst says:<br />

One of the lessons is that you can gain a tremendous advantage by<br />

partnering with big, well-established companies, and people are<br />

going to continue to do that. But those companies are going to find<br />

it very difficult to put their new start-up venture ahead of their own<br />

corporate responsibilities. So when you have a start-up controlled by<br />

big, established companies, it’s going to be a little different than a<br />

real, standalone start-up.<br />

Don’t over-reach. Excite@Home’s ambition to become the next AOL<br />

meant that it over-reached itself, spending money it couldn’t afford.<br />

Differentiate the brand. Ultimately, consumers didn’t have a clear idea of<br />

what the Excite@Home brand stood for. It meant everything and nothing,<br />

and as a result it failed.

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