Fighting brand crises: Lessons from the marketplace

Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan' is a quote attributed to many including President John F Kennedy.

- AMBI PARAMESWARAN

In a similar vein, there are many books about brand successes but very few on brand failures or brand "transgressions". One of the books I managed to read many years ago, Brand Failures by Matt Haig, lists 100 biggest branding mistakes, nicely categorised as PR failures, culture failures, extension failures and so on.

Brands have faced challenges in India too and I was involved in a retreat at a business school that was set up to get brand thinkers to capture the learning from such stories. The book that came out of it, Brands Under Fire, edited by Ivan Arthur and Kurien Mathews, captured the challenges faced by Cadbury Dairy Milk, Pepsi/Coke, and UTI 64. All four brands had to confront major challenges—some self-created, some arising from a hostile environment-but they all managed to survive (UTI 64 vanished, but UTI Mutual Fund emerged from the maelstrom).

Ramya Ramamurthy, who was part of the CNBC team that curated the retreat, has written a wonderful book, Rebuild, which is about how some brands overcame crises and emerged stronger. This book, published in 2018, includes 20+ Indian brand stories, including Maggi Noodles, Kingfisher Airlines, Satyam, Tata Nano, and Nokia.