This book is a great collection of brand-related failures, and many of the incidents covered in this book are both entertaining and informative. However, while all of these cases show failure, I don't think that they all show mistakes. By 'mistake', I mean that the company made a foolish decision that they could reasonably be expected to have made differently at the time.
A lot of these failures we can see in hindsight were because of certain decisions, but it many cases, based on the information provided in the book, it doesn't seem that the decision was wrong given the knowledge and information at hand at the time.
In the end, this book is definitely a fun read for the most part, but most of the time the 'lessons learned' presented at the end of each case seem to be contradicted by some other company somewhere that made the same sorts of decisions and succeeded. Because of this, the only real lesson this book can teach is that there are no absolute rules to successful branding, and while there are certain guidelines that can usually be followed, there are always exceptions to the rules, and quite often the biggest successes have been the companies that defied conventional wisdom.
On a different note, I'm not sure how reliable the information in this book is, since two of the examples provided, the Chevy Nova, and Gerber's baby food in Africa, are regularly repeated examples, however they did not fail for the reasons presented in the book (which are the same reasons usually given by people who tell these stories). These may be exceptions, but they do make me question just how much research was put into the cases presented in the book.
