Brand Marketing: 8 Failure Experiences of New Brands!

I have been writing less recently, which has led everyone to feel that my output has dropped sharply, and this intuition is correct.

Every time I write for a while, I feel drained, so I need to input for a long time.

If I used to be obsessed with studying how new brands succeed, in recent times, I have been obsessed with studying how brands fail.

There may be many reasons for a brand's success, but the reasons for its failure are definitely these 10. Students who are building brands, please carefully compare yourself and see how your brand failed.

Below are the 10 most important reasons why new brands fail that I summarized after studying 1,000 brands. I hope you enjoy it.

1. Being obsessed with product development and ignoring user needs

This was actually expressed in my article 22 Rules of War, which is the so-called egocentric founder.

Arrogant founders are trapped in a closed system, not caring about what real problems the product solves and only thinking superficially.

To give a typical example, you always feel that users don’t understand you, that they don’t know what products you have, and that it’s all the users’ fault, not what problems your product solves.

A common catchphrase is that my product uses XX technology and represents advanced XX. My technique is amazing.

Never care about what users want, and get caught up in product satisfaction.

Another manifestation of this symptom is looking down on any other competing products, turning a blind eye to the obvious advantages of other products, turning a blind eye to users' well-intentioned reminders of defects, and falling into self-satisfaction.

Let me put it this way, I think my product is good in every way, except that users don’t buy it or repurchase it. I feel that other people’s products are not good in any way, except that users always buy competitors’ products. They exaggerate their own data, but dare not face consumer comments and real data.

Any brand founder who does this will have only two outcomes: one is that you are really Musk, and the other is that the company disappears into the long river of history and no one even knows you were there.

However, looking back over the years, it seems that there are no Musks and Jobs among the friends I know. Instead, there are more and more cases in which I have suffered small defeats.

The essence of self-congratulatory products is the psychological problem of the founder, which is that I only care about what I feel, not what consumers feel. Some people even foolishly shout that I can create consumer demand.

Demand is never created, it can only be discovered. If you don't even have this common sense and still want to educate consumers, you will end up failing badly.

2. Died in equity disputes and ignored corporate management

If we talk about the problems that a brand is most likely to fall into, one of them must be the equity issue. Why do I want to talk about corporate equity alone?

This is because in the consumer product entrepreneurship, many partners of some brand entrepreneurs are co-founders with product development or design backgrounds.

This type of co-founder or founder has infinite creativity, but this creativity requires a relaxed environment or a creative environment. The result in such an environment is a conflict between the organizational management culture and this artistic and creative culture.

Since many consumer product companies are started by couples (the early consumer product startup business was too difficult, and it was difficult to find people to partner with you if you were not a couple), this problem is not prominent. After all, it can be solved through trust, communication and coordination between the couple. However, for other types of partners, it is easy to lead to cultural conflicts.

The final result of cultural conflict is equity conflict, or even a breakup. But the more interesting thing is that since many brand companies like to have very close shares, the final outcome is that the brand can no longer operate and has to be split into two companies, or the team leaves, which causes serious damage to the brand.

3. Choosing the wrong track leads to a situation where you cannot succeed no matter how hard you try.

There are good tracks and wrong tracks among consumer goods. In order to avoid damaging some brands, I will not give examples of which are wrong tracks.

The team and the product are obviously good, but the growth is always unsatisfactory, then you may need to pay attention. This is simply because you may have mistakenly entered a niche track or you have targeted a market that is too small.

Of course, businesses are not divided into big and small, but businesses can be divided into strong and weak. Therefore, the outcome of choosing a saline-alkaline track may be that no matter how hard you try, you will not succeed.

These tracks are some obvious categories and some obvious tracks. These tracks have distinct manufacturing characteristics, and the trend of a strong brand emerging is very low.

4. Being too eager for quick success and instant benefits, wavering between making short-term money and long-term brand money, and dying

This is the fourth reason for failure I have summarized. I recently heard an interesting thing when I was communicating with a brand founder:

There was a founder of an early-stage brand who had no desire to obtain financing because his brand had good cash flow.

At this time, an investor wanted to invest in this brand and suggested that she take the investor's money. The starting point of this suggestion was that if she started a business with her own money, she would tend to excessively pursue positive cash flow and ignore the fact that the brand actually requires long-term investment in the early stages. Only long-term investment can form brand assets, and brand assets are the most valuable part of the brand.

This gave me a lot of inspiration. Why are some brands always just goods rather than brands?

The reason is that they have not accumulated their core brand assets. A brand is a collection of total savings value that customers trust, and it takes a long time to accumulate like a bank.

5. Death from traffic hunger

This is a more common way to die. All they think about all day is how to get traffic, as if as long as they invest in traffic they will build a brand.

Therefore, talking about whether there is a traffic bonus all day long, always thinking about taking advantage and making a fortune, this is a mentality of making quick money.

On the Douyin platform, there are many people who invest 1 billion yuan in one go, but the traffic is like water, passing by silently and without a trace.

What is more important than traffic is whether a brand has solved the pain points of society, whether it has solved the pain points of customers, whether it has solved its own pain points, and whether it has solved the pain points of the industry. If these four major pain points are not resolved, there will be no repeat purchases, and a brand without repeat purchases will have no loyalty.

Ultimately, all products must return to solving problems rather than relying solely on traffic. Brands that rely solely on traffic seem to have failed to make it to the final step.

6. Abuse of consulting firms, changing brand propositions all the time

Many brands believe in innovation and when they see new concepts and new ideas, they want to learn them immediately and go public.

This is all caused by too many false thoughts. They just don't dare to consider their own physical condition and actual situation, and think that all strong medicines can be used on themselves.

The typical characteristic is that they like to use various consulting companies indiscriminately, like to ask people for advice indiscriminately, and once they hear something is good, they will immediately start to make changes.

I heard a new method tomorrow and tried it right away, but I just couldn’t get it to work. So there is an excessive love of learning and a neglect of practice. One is to not study at all and just indulge in one's own world. Both extremes are unacceptable.

Back to a brand, once the brand proposition is established, it is actually very simple. You just need to repeat it.

Many people ignore this point. It's like taking medicine or getting an injection. For a medicine to take effect, the dosage must reach a certain level before the dosage can be accumulated to be effective. It's not like a medicine has no effect and you always want to change to a new one immediately.

This result can only make your illness worse.

7. Blindly believing in resources, always thinking that you can get rich by clinging to someone

I have seen pure resource-based entrepreneurs, whose mantra all the time is, I have got a new resource, I have found a resource in a certain place.

This type of entrepreneur is one who blindly believes in resources and always thinks that resources can solve everything, while forgetting the original intention and starting point of entrepreneurship.

This type of entrepreneur is keen on attending numerous meetings and conferences, and always likes to go to various large events and activities. They think that owning resources means owning everything.

This is actually a quick-success-oriented and unrealistic approach.

If you have resources, you think you have everything. This is an illusion. It is obviously impossible to build a good brand based on illusions.

8. Capital hunger, believing that burning money can create a brand

Because many investment institutions are overly pursuing the brand's GMV, the brand does not pursue the accumulation of brand assets, but simply pursues sales.

Sales without repeat purchases are a bottomless pit. The more you promote, the faster you die.

In order to cater to capital data and to compete with competitors, you have to spend time raising more money.

In order to have capital, you need good data, and in order to have good data, you need to spend more money to buy traffic. As far as I know, several so-called popular new brands are heading down this dangerous path.

If it is just such a vicious cycle, it may mean one thing: you are already on a dangerous path. It is time to stop and turn back.

These are the reasons why new brands fail that I have summarized. You can also tell me what other reasons you think there are.

Author: Totoro

Source: New Consumption Insider