We're always looking at, talking about, and learning from the great brands of the world. Its just more fun and probably more constructive. Plus, Craig is an eternal optimist and positivity guru, which is highly infective.

Still, are their lessons to be learned from the dark side? I think so…

Driving down the road last week, as I passed what appeared to be some attempt by U-Haul to give a new look to their trucks, I thought about how no amount of visual change to their brand would ever convince me to use U-Haul again. I've had too many terrible experiences with their service. Which leads me to one of the key principles of branding – a brand is much more than the visual communication of who you are. Your brand starts with WHO you ARE. The visuals are one slice of that pie. Good brands start with a foundation of excellent services, products, staff, environments, systems, etc, etc. All of these pieces construct a complete brand. So while visuals are hugely important, a great visual Identity for a terrible business is still just lipstick on a pig.

So what makes a bad brand? Here's a look at my own personal bottom 3 – the worst brands I've encountered in recent memory. And this is not about the visual side of these brands, but rather about the other components of their brand that do not convince me to return:

1. U-Haul: as I mentioned above, U-Haul is by far one of the worst, most frustrating experiences I've dealt with over the years as a consumer. My worst experience involves a 12 hour round trip that resulted in a waste of 2 days due to a failure on U-Hauls part to provide the truck they had confirmed would be available to me. My reaction – I always use Penske now. More expensive, but WAY better service, follow-through, and equipment.
2. O'Charley's: the food is ok; not great / not terrible. But what puts O'Charley's into my #2 spot is the number of times I have had issues with my food – mainly human articles (hair, etc) located within the recesses of my meal. Strike 1 – ok, its just an accident. Strike 2 – now I'm really grossed out and worried. Strike 3 – goodbye forever.
3. 1and1: this one was tough, as my displeasure is equal with both my experiences with Cable service providers & web hosting. But after much deliberation, I decided that my #3 spot should go to 1and1. 1and1 is a website hosting provider that boasts a 99.9% uptime. Not sure where that stat comes from, but it must exclude the Atlanta area…there is no way we have experienced 99.9% uptime. Most frustrating of all is their customer support. During the last outage we experienced, you could not even call their support line because not only was their hosting down, so were their phones. No matter, we're moving on. I promise, its not us, its you…all you.

So what would it take to convince me to reconsider any one of these brands? A lot. But starters would be both a very public and a personal address dealing with the errors of their ways – think JetBlue. Next, a very specific gameplan on how they would tackle these issues. And last, results. I'd want to see them follow-through with their promises. And at the end of that, a visual rebrand would be a great way of culminating all the changes they had made to their brand. Then I'd believe that it was more than just lipstick on a pig.

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