Synopses & Reviews
""This book is a lot of fun ... Haig wants to educate as well as to entertain, and at this he succeeds. ... Anyone with a professional interest or involvement in brand management should read this book."" -- Anthony Di Benedetto, Professor of Marketing, Temple University in Journal of Consumer Marketing
Review
""Haig, a marketing consultant, is one of a new breed of writers producing marketing primers for the hyphenated age of e-marketing. This type of work is characterized by breezily written snippets of success or failure as either encouragement or admonition for the practitioner or for a new category of reader: the business voyeur. Thus these works are written in a readable and appealing format, as e-business fables. Examining 'the 100 biggest branding mistakes of all time, ' Haig organizes these 100 ""failures"" into ten types, each with its own moral and admonition. These types include classic failures (e.g., New Coke), idea failures (e.g., R.J. Reynolds' smokeless cigarettes), extension failures (e.g., Harley Davidson perfume), culture failures (e.g., Kelloggs in India), and technology failures (e.g., Pets.com). The idea behind this work is that with knowledge these failures can be avoided, but this reviewer regards it as akin to Monday morning quarterbacking in its validity as an activity. None of this takes away the schadenfreude of this well-written, quick read. Useful more as a cultural artifact than classroom text, this book could serve as supplementary reading for advanced marketing courses and for business voyeurs who like a good read. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduate and graduate students; and practitioners."" -- S. A. Schulman, CUNY Kingsborough Community College
Synopsis
*Aimed at marketing practitioners and students. * Uses real examples and comments from leading business experts. What do Coca-Cola, McDonald's, IBM, Microsoft and Virgin have in common? They have all launched new branded products that have failed - spectacularly and at great cost. Brand Failures looks at how such disasters occur. It looks at those brands that have launched with the help of multi-million dollar advertising campaigns and then sunk without trace. Matt Haig recounts classic examples from every era of branding including more recent brand failures. The book also has great practical value: each brand scenario includes a checklist of lessons learnt, so providing how not to advice. Some of the brand disasters covered are: Coca-Cola (New Coke), Chevy, Fender, Harley-Davidson, IBM, Microsoft, McDonalds's, Mr. Donut, Perrier, Pets.com, Quaker, Sony, Tang and Virgin.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [301]-302) and index.
About the Author
Matt Haig is an acclaimed author and journalist. His titles include: Brand Failures, Brand Success, Brand Royalty, E-PR: The Essential Guide to Public Relations on the Internet; Mobile Marketing: the Message Revolution; and The E-marketing Handbook.