Brand Failures

Idea failures 43
Tale and The Animal. Manning referred to Heath Ledger, star of A Knight’s
Tale, as ‘this year’s hottest new star’, and claimed The Animal was ‘another
winner’.
However, in June 2001 Newsweek magazine revealed that David Manning
didn’t exist, and had been invented by an unidentified Sony marketing
executive the summer before to put a bit of positive spin on the hit-starved
studio’s films. Manning’s ‘reviews’ had also made their way onto posters
promoting Sony’s Hollow Man and Vertical Limit movies. ‘It was an incredibly
foolish decision, and we’re horrified,’ a Sony spokeswoman said at the
time. Sadly, David Manning’s opinion of Godzilla will remain unknown.
Lessons from Godzilla
Remember that bigger isn’t always better. Everything about the movie had
been big – the star, the special effects, the marketing budget, the brand tieins
– but it hadn’t been enough. Ironically, the slogan for the film was ‘Size
matters’. In this case, it clearly didn’t.
Don’t over-market your brand. The excessive amount of hype and brand
extensions Sony had created for Godzilla ended up working against it. As
branding guru Tom Peters has put it, ‘leverage is good, too much leverage
is bad’. This view is supported and expanded by anti-brand guru Naomi
Klein who predicts in No Logo that ‘the current mania for synergy will
collapse under the weight of its unfulfilled promises.’
Concentrate on the end product. It is true that branding is often more about
perception than reality, but if your end product is truly awful the brand
perception will always be negative.