Big companies & how they kill their own brands

I get on my soap box from time to time, and this is one of them.

This post is about “How to screw up your Brand Power”. We have several companies here in Australia that deal in electronics, whitegoods, furniture – so they are the bare bones of retail if you will. These companies obviously push their brand heavily in the traditional media such as TV, papers and mail drops.

Now there is nothing at all wrong with this (all businesses need to push their brand in areas that give them that brand recall over a competitor), however it is the way they do it.

Let me give you an example. Harvey Norman is one of these large companies that run loads and loads of ads in prime time TV spots, I think they offset the cost in the ad placement by producing the worst ads possible . The ads they put on have to be some of the cheapest and most annoying. Now before anyone says “ah ha – but see you’re talking about them in your blog so it must be effective”……..  keep reading. Bad publicity is not always good publicity. Read more…