“Brand failures: The Truth about the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time” book review

I’ve been reading this book for almost 2 month now, not because its long, but because it has stories about a hundred famous brands and how they failed or are expected to fail, each brand story is discussed in an average of 3 pages in an interesting way and ends with a “what is learn from the failure story?” which sometimes is a bit silly and contains some repeated material, but it still give a lot of insight

I used to read a “story” or more each day and that’s is why it took me too long, to finish but that was the best thing about the book since the story would take around 10 minutes to read and that makes reading a possibility during school days and maybe exams

The book is very helpful for marketing students, or for anyone interested in the marketing fields, actually I read it because my marketing professor recommended it, as it further enforces the marketing basics and rules through examples that you probably would not forget

The interesting thing that after reading the book you see (or at least I sow) that when companies corrupt or fall, it’s usually because of its heads. That is simple and well known, and the case of the fall of Enron is an undeniable proof on the effects of mal management, but this book shows you that companies don’t need financial managers to manipulate its earnings, or any form of financial scandal to fall, they just need a bad idea embraced by its top management, or an arrogant CEO, and baaaam, everything goes down regardless of how efficient everything was, that idea is not widely spread among the business students I met, we usually believe that well established companies with a good market share won’t easily fall, but that is not the case at all, in fact the arrogance of these companies and their self-esteem is what drives them down

It also showed the real power of marketing, I used to believe that if a product is good it will sell itself with no need for intensive marketing, that is true and the book proves that in many cases, but in others, if your marketing is not good, if customers don’t actually understand what the product is for, or if you unintentionally communicate a bad message through ineffective ads, you are screwed, regardless of how genius the product is

You’ll really think about all the concepts you know about economics, business & marketing, and in some cases many of these concepts will get integrated and more interesting, I recommend reading this book, specially if you would read a story or two from it each day, so you don’t spend a lot of time, and have something to think about all day

Please share your thoughts if you have read the book, or after you read it