Big Brands and its Extension Failures....!!

Hey readers, Branding is always been one of the subject of my major interests.I like to dive in the world of the brands and understand their behavior and the strategies applied to differentiate it from the others.The study of Branding is definitely a hobby like thing for me. Guys, here in this post i have come up with a synopsis of understanding of the Big brands and its extension failures.Before that lets understand the basics of Brand Failures.

Defining Brand Failures

A Brand is a failure when its presence in the market leads to: -

• The withdrawal of the product/brand from the market for any reason;

• The inability of a product/brand to realize the required market share to sustain its presence in the market;

• The inability of a product/brand 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 sub-standard engineering, design or marketing. Based on this critical definition, there are hundreds of bad movies that have reached â cult status and financial success while many a good movies have been box office bombs. Other premier products fail because of competitive actions. Sony 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.

So, why does brand fail...?? There are number of reasons for this. Here are some of them:

1.Wrong Positioning.

2.Lack of Differentiation Strategies.

3.Ineffective Promotion, including the packaging message.

4.Not understanding the Target Market Segment

5.Incorrectly Priced-too high and too low.

6.Poor timing of Distribution.

7.Misleading the Market research that did not actually reflect the consumer's behavior of the Targeted Segment.

And lot more......!!


There are numerous examples of Brand Extension Failures. They are:

1. Coke's launch of Black Cherry Vanilla Coke and Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke failure miserable

2. Pepsi's Cafechino looks like a disaster in India as very people have actually gone for it

3. Virgin: The company was able to stretch its considerable brand equities from the entertainment to the travel industry. Virgin Airlines is a success. But does anyone remember Virgin cola? Virgin vodka? Virgin jeans?

4. Ready-to-eat pizza from Amul, India

5. Dulux paints with a unique selling proposition of 7-day fragrance

6. GPI, impressed by the rising working women population and their increasing smoking habits, launched "Ms" cigarettes amidst much fanfare, exclusively for this segment. You know where Ms is today -- nowhere in the market! The company lost out heavily in ad and promotion expenses, not to count the lost (wo)man-hours. GPI did not bother to research the smoking habits of Indian women. Our women actually prefer popular men's brands!

7. Ponds Toothpaste had been a dismal failure.

Learnings: The key to successful brand extensions: the determination that the proposed extensions are consistent with core brand values. Brand extension ideas should not emanate from management's point of view, but from the consumer's.