Brand Failures
Brand Failures Brand Failures
246 Brand failures Lessons from Intel’s Pentium chip Remember that bad news makes the front page – whereas good news is relegated to page 17 of the Sunday supplement; it’s as simple as that. As Lord Northcliffe, the founder of the Daily Mail, once said: ‘News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.’ Don’t ignore online criticism. Alongside Intel, McDonald’s, Shell, Apple, Netscape and, most frequently, Microsoft, have suffered as a result of letting negative issues develop online until the offline media pick them up and transform them into a crisis. Respond quickly. While the Internet may give people who have a grudge against your firm an attentive audience of similarly aggrieved individuals, it also gives businesses the opportunity to respond quickly and effectively to the spread of misinformation. Monitor your critics. Trouble builds-up slowly over time and, in all but the rarest cases, it is only poor management that transforms an ‘issue’ into a ‘crisis’. Although cyberspace gives your e-critics a voice they may not have elsewhere, it also allows you to predict, locate and respond to negative publicity.
Internet and new technology failures 247 87 IBM’s Linux graffiti One of the best ways to generate publicity for a brand is to deploy unconventional tactics. For instance, when London nightclub the Ministry of Sound projected its logo onto the side of the Houses of Parliament, the media attention was immense. Indeed, it was considered such a successful trick that a few years later FHM promoted its ‘100 Sexiest Women of the Year’ campaign with the same tactic, beaming the image of an almost naked Gail Porter (one of the contenders for the number one spot) onto the side of the historic building. Such outlandish techniques are generally referred to as ‘guerrilla marketing’. The logic behind guerrilla marketing is straightforward: if a company promotes itself in such a unique fashion it will not only be able to gain press coverage, but will also stick in people’s minds and encourage word-of-mouth publicity. Furthermore, guerrilla marketing is usually cheap. When the online portal and search engine Yahoo! wanted to promote its Yahoo! mail services, it didn’t decide to invest in hundreds of magazine ads. No. It built a couple of cows. The company took part in an event called the Cow Parade in which cows were decorated according to different themes. Yahoo!’s ‘udderly moovelous’ (as it put it in a press release) pair of purple plastic cows were installed with an Internet facility that enabled members of the New York crowd to send ‘moomail’ messages to each other. Although this tactic was undeniably ‘out there’, it succeeded because it was relevant to the service it was promoting. However, some guerrilla techniques have had considerably less success. For example, when IBM hired an innovative advertising agency to promote its Linux-based software, the campaign involved employing graffiti artists to
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246 <strong>Brand</strong> failures<br />
Lessons from Intel’s Pentium chip<br />
Remember that bad news makes the front page – whereas good news is<br />
relegated to page 17 of the Sunday supplement; it’s as simple as that. As<br />
Lord Northcliffe, the founder of the Daily Mail, once said: ‘News is what<br />
somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.’<br />
Don’t ignore online criticism. Alongside Intel, McDonald’s, Shell, Apple,<br />
Netscape and, most frequently, Microsoft, have suffered as a result of<br />
letting negative issues develop online until the offline media pick them up<br />
and transform them into a crisis.<br />
Respond quickly. While the Internet may give people who have a grudge<br />
against your firm an attentive audience of similarly aggrieved individuals,<br />
it also gives businesses the opportunity to respond quickly and effectively<br />
to the spread of misinformation.<br />
Monitor your critics. Trouble builds-up slowly over time and, in all but the<br />
rarest cases, it is only poor management that transforms an ‘issue’ into a<br />
‘crisis’. Although cyberspace gives your e-critics a voice they may not have<br />
elsewhere, it also allows you to predict, locate and respond to negative<br />
publicity.
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