Some brands rise and continue to grow while others plummet downhill, eventually being forgotten over time. Some of these started off well but failed for various reasons, which isn’t unusual in these rough economic times. If you have a brand that you want to grow or protect, take a look at a few brands that didn’t make it and see how you can avoid your brand falling to a similar fate.
Sometimes brands lose value due to poor management decisions, an inability to keep up with the competition, or simply because the brand has outgrown its “useful lifetime”. Sometimes failure is caused because of over-confidence, which leads to carelessness and laziness – both detrimental to the success of a brand. It doesn’t matter how powerful a brand is as any brand can be affected by bad decision making.
Look at the Chevrolet volt, for example. While it was a highly innovative car, it didn’t succeed for a couple of crucial reasons. The first being that there simply was not enough demand for it, which could be down to poor marketing. But, more importantly, some of the models had a faulty battery. This led to a recall of around 8,000 cars. Even though they eventually corrected the battery problem, it was too late. There were clearly a lot of bad decisions made along the way here.
