Brand Failures

Internet and new technology failures 249
88 boo.com
The party’s over
A magazine ad depicting a man vomiting into a dustbin may not be the most
conventional tactic to use in order to sell sportswear, but then boo.com was
hardly the most conventional company. The September 1999 advertising
campaign, in which this image appeared, was designed to let everyone know
that the first global sportswear site had arrived, in style, and that it was about
to take the world by storm. Of course, the reality was rather different.
On 18 May 2000, less than a year after its launch, liquidators from the
accounting firm KPMG were called in to the company’s London headquarters.
After spending millions and attracting relatively few customers,
boo.com became what The Financial Times referred to as ‘the highest profile
casualty among European e-tailing start-ups’.
Although boo.com is one of the most obvious and spectacular brand
failures of the dot.com era – if not all time – it was founded on reasonably
secure marketing logic. As Al and Laura Ries write in The 22 Immutable Laws
of Branding, ‘the most efficient, most productive, most useful aspect of
branding is creating a new category.’ There is no denying that ever since
boo.com’s Swedish founders Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander had visited
Amazon in 1997, they believed this was the key to dot.com success. As
Malmsten writes in the best selling account of the boo phenomenon, boo hoo:
If we were really to achieve the global impact we hoped for then we had
to exploit ‘first mover’ advantage. If you’re first, then you achieve vital