This document discusses branding and factors that can lead to brand failure. It defines branding as identifying a company or its products through words or images. Branding helps consumers remember products and increases sales by making a product or service the most visible and desired. The document then discusses reasons why branding is important, such as promoting recognition, encouraging repeat business and customer loyalty. It also examines factors that can lead to brand failure, such as not meeting market share goals or profitability. The document analyzes how product failures can inform future product development and discusses distinguishing failures from short-lived fads.

1. 1
INTRODUCTION
Branding is used in businesses and organizations of all sizes and types. Branding is intended to
identify goods or services and deliver the message that a particular organization, business, or
product is the only one that can suit customers' needs.
What is Branding?
Branding is the process of using a word or an image to identify a company or its products.
It is what separates competitors and helps consumers remember a product. The purpose of
a brand is to increase sales by making the product or service the most visible and desired by the
consumer. Branding is becoming more than a logo or a product. It is becoming a promise of
quality and reputation! It encompasses everything about a company, sometimes good and
sometimes bad, depending on the public’s perception.
The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines
A brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to
identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from
those of other sellers.
Therefore it makes sense to understand that branding is not about getting your target
market to choose you over the competition, but it is about getting your prospects to see you as
the only one that provides a solution to their problem.
A brand consists of eight basic building blocks:
 The name
 The logo (brand icon)
 The brand’s colors
 The slogan and brand messaging
 The sound of the brand
 The overall look and feel = the brand’s position
 Packaging the brand
 The brand experience

2. 2
Why is Branding Important?
In today’s fast-paced world, it is more important than ever to promote recognition of a
product or service. If you're remembered as a quality provider, then you will be encouraging
repeat business. Branding is a great way to promote this recognition because people are busy
and tend to adhere to familiarity. If consumers recognize a brand that they have previously used
and they remember being satisfied with it, then they are more likely to choose that product or
service again. This is especially true in the tremendous hodgepodge of advertising going on
today.
Benefits of Branding
Your business needs to create a positive image in the minds of consumers. Contrary to what
most people believe, branding isn’t just a logo. Your business’s purpose, focus, and image all
combine to create your brand. Why should you make this effort? Below are a few benefits:
 You are remembered: It’s hard to remember a company with a generic name. You may
not be able to distinguish their purpose and business focus. And why would you call a
company if you couldn’t tell what they did? Branding your business ensures that
consumers will know what you’re about.
 You gain customer loyalty: The fact is, people build close bonds with brand identities.
Consumers want quality products that they can trust. So, your business should have an
identity that your customers can cling to. If your company delivers great products and
services and has a great brand identity, people will remember you. Additionally, they will
often refer you to friends and family.
 You become well-known: You want the people who have not done business with you to
still know who you are and what you do. If they see your ads on billboards, hear them on
the radio, see them on television, or any other media, they will know your brand identity.
And when the time comes that they need your product or service, your company will be
the first to come to mind.
 Consumers pay for image: We are a very brand-aware society. People commonly
associate brand names with quality and may only buy certain brands for that reason. If
people only want one brand of a particular product, they are willing to pay a higher price.
Having a great brand will make your company have a superior image and cause
consumers to forget about the competition.

3. 3
The objectives that a good brand will achieve include:
 Delivers the message clearly
 Confirms your credibility
 Connects your target prospects emotionally
 Motivates the buyer
 Concretes User Loyalty
Your brand resides within the hearts and minds of customers, clients, and prospects. It is the
sum total of their experiences and perceptions, some of which you can influence, and some that
you cannot.
A strong brand is invaluable as the battle for customers intensifies day by day. It's important to
spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all your brand is
the source of a promise to your consumer. It's a foundational piece in your marketing
communication and one you do not want to be without.
Branding Approaches
- Individual product branding - Each new product is assigned a new name with no connection to
other brands owned by a company.
- Family branding - New products are placed under an existing brand.
- Co-branding - The marketer partners with another firm that has an existing, established brand
in hopes that the theory “two brands are better than one” will stimulate interest.
- Private or store branding - When suppliers produce products for other companies, and place
that company’s brand on the product.
- No Name Branding - Also referred to as generic branding, this is a “brand less” product that is
sold as a low-cost alternative to a brand name product.

4. 4
Some brand names in world

5. 5
OBJECTIVE OF REPORT:
 To understand what is real meaning of the brand and how its give value to the
company.
 To better understanding the reasons or factors effecting for failure of brands in
market.
 To know the business cycle analysis for branding.
 To examine the practical situations of brand fall downs
 To understanding the how maintain a strong brand in market.

6. 6
Methodology of study:
Information should be taken from various secondary sources like websites, reports .This
report could be prepared and analysis based on the various past data.
Main source should be
 News papers
 Websites
 Different reports
 Different publication books.
Period taken - 7 days
Source - - secondary source

7. 7
Scope of report:
Brand Categories - All type of companies including FMCG’S, IT, AUTOMOBILES,pharmacy and
Textile industries.
Languages - English
Geography - All
Period for study - 7 days

8. 8
Limitation of study -
This report is limited to a analysis of two or three companies this result will be suitable for a
some companies only like profit motive companies only.
This study is restricted to a few factors only like customer satisfaction and new technology and
taste and preferences.
Other factors should be ignored.

9. 9
TEXT
Brand failure –
Product and brand failures occur on an ongoing basis to varying degrees
within most product-based organizations. This is the negative aspect of the development and
marketing process. In most cases, this “failure rate” syndrome ends up being a numbers game.
There must be some ratio of successful products to each one that ends up being a failure. When
this does not happen, the organization is likely to fail, or at least experience financial difficulties
that prohibit it from meeting profitability objectives. The primary goal is to learn from product
and brand failures so that future product development, design, strategy and implementation will
be more successful.
Studying product failures allows those in the planning and implementation
process to learn from the mistakes of other product and brand failures. Each product failure can
be investigated from the perspective of what, if anything, might have been done differently to
produce and market a successful product rather than one that failed. The ability to identify key
signs in the product development process can be critical. If the product should make it this far,
assessing risk before the product is marketed can save an organization’s budget, and avoid the
intangible costs of exposing their failure to the market.
Defining product and brand failures
A product is a failure when its presence in the market leads to:
 The withdrawal of the product from the market for any reason;
 The inability of a product to realize the required market share to sustain its presence in
the market;
 The inability of a product to achieve the anticipated life cycle as defined by the
organization due to any reason; or,
 The ultimate failure of a product to achieve profitability.
Failures are not necessarily the result of substandard engineering, design or
marketing. Based on critic’s definitions, there are hundreds of “bad” movies that have reached
“cult status” and financial success while many “good” movies have been box office bombs.
Other premier products fail because of competitive actions. Sony’s Beta format was a clearly
superior product to VHS, but their decision to not enable the format to be standardized
negatively impacted distribution and availability, which resulted in a product failure. The
“Tucker” was a superior vehicle compared to what was on the market at the time. This failure
was due to General Motors burying the fledging organization in the courts to eliminate a future
competitor with a well designed product posing a potential threat to their market share. Apple
has experienced a series of product failures, with consistent repetition as they continue to fight
for market share.

10. 10
Product failures and the product life cycle
Most products experience some form of the product life cycle where they create that familiar—or
a variant—form of the product life cycle based on time and sales volume or revenue. Most
products experience the recognized life cycle stages including:
1. Introduction
2. Growth
3. Maturity (or saturation)
4. Decline
In some cases, product categories seem to be continuously in demand, while other products never
find their niche. These products lack the recognized product life cycle curve.
Failure, fad, fashion or style?
It is important to distinguish a product failure from a product fad, style or a
fashion cycle. The most radical product life cycle is that of a fad. Fads have a naturally short life
cycle and in fact, are often predicted to experience rapid gain and rapid loss over a short period
of time—a few years, months, or even weeks with online fads. One music critique expected “The
Bay City Rollers” to rival the Beatles. Do you know who they are? And the pet rock lasted
longer than it should have, making millions for its founders.
A “fashion” is what describes the accepted emulation of trends in several
areas, such as clothing and home furnishings. The product life cycle of a “style” also appears in
clothing as well as art, architecture, cars and other esthetic-based products. The “end” of these
product life cycles does not denote failures, but marks the conclusion of an expected cycle that
will be replaced and repeated by variations of other products that meet the same needs and
perform the same functions.
Something happens to break the bond between the customer and the brand
• This is not always the fault of the company, as some things really are beyond their immediate
control (global recession, technological advances, international disasters etc).
• This altered view is a result of one of the following seven deadly sins of branding

11. 11
Thus, overall there are 7 reasons of why Brands fail.
1) Brand recall drops – Here actually the
marketing department is to be blamed. A
company has to put in efforts to ensure that it
has high brand recall value and that the brand
is repeatedly bombarded to the customer to
increase brand recall. The positioning of the
brand needs to be up to mark as well.
However, when brand recall drops, customers
slowly move to another brand. This may cause brand failure as the recall is too low for the brand
to continue.

12. 12
2) Too much expansion with few resources – Some companies aim to expand very fast as
compared to the resources they have or their brands potential to carry so many products. If you
look at Samsung as a company, their mobile phones, refrigerators and televisions are
in demand but their cameras and air conditioners have failed. Thus, expanding too fast or too
much will leave with few resources to maintain your brand equity across the segments.
3) False marketing – A brand is a promise. And if that promise breaks, you don’t have a brand.
For example, when Harley Davidson introduced perfumes, the brand was severely affected.
Because Harley Davidsons promise to its followers is for the ride that they are going to get on
their bikes. However, when Harley came with a commercial product like a perfume, it was
received negatively by the HOG group because Harley broke its promise.
4) Over marketing – Over marketing causes the brand to become too common and thereby the
brand might lose value because of Brand fatigue. Too much exposure makes the brand become
undesirable.
5) Irrelevancy – The brand might become irrelevant because of many reasons. One of the most
common reason is technology. For example – Nokia as a brand lost its market share because it
did not give the latest technology to its customers.
6) Increase in competition – Increasing competition has caused the brands value to be diluted.
For example – In soaps and shampoos, there are a lot of brands which came and went or couldn’t
conquer. This is because already there is such high competition that a brand is not able to stick
and even brands which slow down in their pace, risk being thrown out of the market. Similar is
the case in the Cola market where Gold spot bombed because it was not able to keep up with the
competition.
7) Service is not upto mark – Bad service was one of the reasons that Air India dropped as a
brand. If your service is not upto mark, then the users post sales experience is very bad which
eventually affects the brand and might cause a brand to fail.
Thus overall there are many reasons of why brands fail. However, it comes down to the fact that
you cannot blame a product failure to branding efforts. The product needs to have an inherent
value for the branding to work.

13. 13
Examples of product failures
The following is an abbreviated list of product failures that may provide insight that will help to
identify product and brand success factors:
Automotive and transportation
 Cadillac Cimarron
 Pontiac Fiero
 Chevrolet Corvair
 Ford Edsel
 The DeLorean
 Crosley
 The Tucker
 The Gremlin, the Javelin and a complete line of other models by American Motors
 GM’s passenger diesel engine
 Mazda’s Wankel rotary engine
 Firestone 500 tire
 Goodyear tires used on the Ford Explorer
 Concorde—supersonic airliner
Computer industry
 IBM’s PCjr—introduced in March 1985
 Apple’s Newton
 Apple’s Lisa
 Coleco’s Adam
 Percon’s Pocketreader—hand held scanner, now operating under the company name
PSC
 Bumble Bee’s software version of the book “What Color is Your Parachute”
Entertainment
 Quadraphonic audio equipment
 World Football League
 Women’s National Basketball Association
 World League of American Football
 United States Football League
 “He and She,” “Berrengers,” every spinoff done by the former cast of “Seinfeld,” and
dozens of other television shows each year.
 “Of God’s and Generals,” “Heavens Gate,” “Water World,” “The Postman” and other
movies—with a disproportionately high number produced by Kevin Costner.

14. 14
Food and beverage
 Burger King’s veal parmesan
 Burger King’s pita salad
 McRib—and still being tested and tried
 Nestle’s New Cookery—but a successor, Lean Cuisine, is a big hit
 Gerber’s Singles—dinners in jars, for adults—early ’70s
 Chelsea—“baby beer”
Photographic and video
 Polaroid instant home movies
 SX-70 (Polaroid instant camera)
 RCA Computers (Spectra-70)
 Video-disc players
 DIVX variant on DVD
Other products
 DuPont’s CORFAM —synthetic leather
 Mattel’s Aquarius
 Timex’s Sinclair
 Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo (1979)
 Sparq portable mass storage
 Rely tampons
 Relax-a-cizor—vibrating chair
 Louisiana World Exposition—and its gondola

15. 15
FINDINGS:
Common reasons for product failures
In addition to a faulty concept or product design, some of the most common reasons for
product failures typically fall into one or more of these categories:
 High level executive push of an idea that does not fit the targeted market.
 Overestimated market size.
 Incorrectly positioned product.
 Ineffective promotion, including packaging message, which may have used misleading or
confusing marketing message about the product, its features, or its use.
 Not understanding the target market segment and the branding process that would
provide the most value for that segment.
 Incorrectly priced—too high and too low.
 Excessive research and/or product development costs.
 Underestimating or not correctly understanding competitive activity or retaliatory
response.
 Poor timing of distribution.
 Misleading market research that did not accurately reflect the actual consumer’s
behavior for the targeted segment.
 Conducted marketing research and ignored those findings.
 Key channel partners were not involved, informed, or both.
 Lower than anticipated margins.
Using these potential causes of a product or brand failure as a guide while you write your
marketing plan can help you avoid committing the same errors. Learning from these “lessons”
can be beneficial to avoid some of these pitfalls and increase the chance for success when you
launch that next product or brand.

16. 16
Recommendations/ Suggestions:
 Identify Your Key Audiences: The first step in building a brand image is identifying your
target audiences. This will consist of a mix of external and internal groups, such as
customers, partners, industry analysts and employees. It’s important to be very specific
when defining your audiences. You need to know whom you are targeting to craft an
effective marketing strategy that will speak directly to their needs and concerns.
 Determine Critical Business Goals: You must know where you are going before you can
get there. Building a brand image without knowing your short-term and long-term
business goals is ineffective and a waste of valuable resources.
 Define Your Brand Persona: Once you have determined your key audiences and critical
business goals, you can start to build out your brand persona. This should appeal to
customers and articulate your most important differentiators and product benefits. Your
brand persona defines your brand image so it’s important to keep this simple and
relevant.
 Develop Key Messaging: After you’ve defined your brand image, document your key
messages and align them with your audiences. Your key messages will be the most
important takeaways you want your audience to walk away with after interacting with
your brand. They should incorporate the unique aspects of your business and value added
to customers, with a splash of your brand personality.

17. 17
Conclusion:
Successful brand-building helps profitability by “adding values” that customers are prepared to
pay for.
Strong brands inspire customer loyalty leading to repeat sales and word-of mouth
recommendation
The brand owner can usually charge higher prices, especially if the brand is the market leader
Better access to distribution - retailers, distributors and other sellers usually want to stock top
selling brands. With limited shelf space it is more likely the top brands will be on the shelf than
less well-known brands

18. 18
Bibliography:
http://articles.bplans.com/product-and-brand-failures-a-marketing-
perspective/#ixzz3bnwitRui
www.google.co.in
http://www.knowthis.com/product-decisions/advantages-of-brands
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand