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Failures, Predictions on
May 23rd, 2010 by
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I was cheering on hi5.com for quite some time now. They were the underdogs to Facebook and Myspace, but have a very strong presence in Thailand. I liked their colorful interface and a lot of the features and tools they employed, which made it easy to interact with others and find new friends.
But now, they’ve destroyed their website by loading it with popup ads and self-running video ads. 2 minutes on the site feels like sitting through an infomercial for 30 minutes.
Their traffic has fallen from 8 to 6 million visitors daily, and I expect this number will continue to decline as long as they continue pushing ads in their members faces. Bye Bye, it was nice knowing you.
Posted in
Blunders and Fail, Branding, Failures on
May 29th, 2009 by
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Be the first to comment Tags: automotive failure, big three, brand identity, Branding, brands, chrysler, fail, failure, ford, gm
There’s a lot of reasons why the big 3 failed, pundits will argue that it’s the UAW union, management or the dealers or that they are spread too thin into the verticals from financing to steel mills. The biggest reason put out there is that they simply aren’t building cars people want.
Ultimately there’s always one reason that carries the most weight when pinpointing a given failure. Most will agree that GM, Ford and Chrysler failed because “they aren’t building products that consumers want“.
To back this up, all one needs to do is look at the biggest losing cars ever.
1990-Present
In the past 20 years, 7 out of 10 of the biggest automobile failures has been American cars. That’s 70%. So clearly, America is the leader of crap cars. But this doesn’t necessarily mean they “aren’t creating cars people want to drive”, there’s a difference, a big difference.
The difference can be summed up in one word… BRANDING!
People want to drink coffee from white plastic lidded cups with a circular green logo on it. People want to listen to their music from white ear bud iPods, check their emails with Blackberrys. The world of consumerism is all about branding, and there’s no more importance in branding than a car.
A car is an ultimate representation of who you are, who you think you are, or who you want to be. And it goes a little something like this:
I’m conservative and safety consciences = Volvo. I’m rich and into Luxury = Mercedes. I’m well off and into Performance and Luxury = BMW. I’m doing alright and into performance, luxury and value = Audi. I’m a family oriented person into simple quality engineering = VW. I into precision engineering, luxury and value = Lexus. I’m all about high quality and high value = Honda and Toyota. I have more money than the baby Jesus = Lamborghini.
Now, lets look at what the American automotive brands represent:
I live in the ghetto but wanna come across as fly with deep pockets: Cadillac. I want something parked on the front lawn of my doublewide trailer jacked up with one wheel missing: Pontiac. I want a cheap car that looks like an expensive European car, or even a Bentley: Chrysler. I want a car that looks and drives like a cheap rental car: Most other American cars.
The Big 3 can not simply create cars people want to drive, because they killed their brand. Nobody wants to drive garbage, and for far too many people, the Big 3′s brand stands for garbage. This should be written in history books for what it is, brand failure.
But there is hope on the horizon for the American automotive sector.
