Brand Failures

250 Brand failures
recognition as you become identified with whatever you’re selling. You
get a lot of free publicity and customer confidence because you’re the
leader. It’s then very difficult for the second wave to compete. Amazon.
com was a shining example of that. Here was a company that spent
almost nothing on marketing before its IPO, but still managed to create
one of the best known brands in the world.
When boo.com became public knowledge in May 1999, via an article in The
Financial Times, Kasja Leander announced the company in these terms:
‘Sportswear is an international market and there are a lot of people in Europe
who read about products in US magazines but can’t go over to buy them. This
is one of the few sectors of Internet retailing that no one’s done on a large
scale and we want boo to be the number one brand.’
So neither Malmsten nor Leander can be accused of ignoring branding.
The idea, from the start, was to create a ‘fully branded shopping experience
on the Net,’ an online equivalent of high fashion department stores such as
London’s Harvey Nichols or New York’s Bloomingdales, only with the main
focus on urban and sportswear from hip brands such as Adidas, New Balance
and North Face.
However, the brand that really mattered was boo itself. As Malmsten has
explained, the aim was to make ‘the name of the store itself as significant as
anything you could buy in it.’ Again, this displays solid brand-thinking, and
marked boo apart from many other dot.coms that had sprung from the
minds of technologists. But the problem was that whatever it can represent,
the Internet is technology.
If you are going to create what Malmsten referred to as ‘a gateway to world
cool’ (as quoted in a June 2000 Industry Standard article), you need software
to make sure people can access the gateway in the first place. In other words,
your Web site has to work.
On the first day of its eventual launch, 4 November 1999 (two months
after the premature advertising campaign featuring the man vomiting into a
dustbin) the problems with the boo.com Web site soon became apparent.
The site crashed seconds after it went live. And then, when people could finally
access the site, the real headaches, both for boo and its customers, began.
One of these headaches related to the heavy use of Flash software, which
enabled the site to be animated. Indeed, one of the key features of the site
was the virtual shop assistant Miss Boo who was only able to come to life