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Failure is the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success. Product failure ranges from failure to sell the product to fracture of the product, in the worst cases leading to personal injury, the province of forensic engineering.

Criteria

The criteria for failure are heavily dependent on context of use, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. A situation considered to be a failure by one might be considered a success by another, particularly in cases of direct competition or a zero-sum game. Similarly, the degree of success or failure in a situation may be differently viewed by distinct observers or participants, such that a situation that one considers to be a failure, another might consider to be a success, a qualified success or a neutral situation.

It may also be difficult or impossible to ascertain whether a situation meets criteria for failure or success due to ambiguous or ill-defined definition of those criteria. Finding useful and effective criteria, or heuristics, to judge the success or failure of a situation may itself be a significant task.

Commercial failures

A commercial failure is a product or company that does not reach expectations of success.

Most of the items listed below had high expectations, significant financial investments, and/or widespread publicity, but fell far short of success. Due to the subjective nature of "success" and "meeting expectations," there can be disagreement about what constitutes a "major flop."

• For flops in computer and video gaming, see list of commercial failures in computer and video gaming
• For company failures related to the 1997–2001 dot-com bubble, see dot-com company
• Box-office bomb

Sometimes, commercial failures can receive a cult following, with the initial lack of commercial success even lending a cachet of subcultural coolness.

In marketing

Marketing researchers have distinguished between outcome and process failures. An outcome failure is a failure to obtain a good or service at all; a process failure is a failure to receive the good or service in an appropriate or preferable way. Thus, a person who is only interested in the final outcome of an activity would consider it to be an outcome failure if the core issue has not been resolved or a core need is not met. A process failure occurs, by contrast, when, although the activity is completed successfully, the customer still perceives the way in which the activity is conducted to be below an expected standard or benchmark.

Wan and Chan note that outcome and process failures are associated with different kinds of detrimental effects to the consumer. They observe that "n outcome failure involves a loss of economic resources (i.e., money, time) and a process failure involves a loss of social resources (i.e., social esteem)".

In education

A failing grade is a mark or grade given to a student to indicate that they did not pass an assignment or a class. Grades may be given as numbers, letters or other symbols. By the year 1884, Mount Holyoke College was evaluating students' performance on a 100-point or percentage scale and then summarizing those numerical grades by assigning letter grades to numerical ranges. Mount Holyoke assigned letter grades A through E, with E indicating lower than 75% performance and designating failure. The A–E system spread to Harvard University by 1890. In 1898, Mount Holyoke adjusted the grading system, adding an F grade for failing (and adjusting the ranges corresponding to the other letters). The practice of letter grades spread more broadly in the first decades of the 20th century. By the 1930s, the letter E was dropped from the system, for unclear reasons.

In science

Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly explains that a great deal can be learned from things going wrong unexpectedly, and that part of science's success comes from keeping blunders "small, manageable, constant, and trackable". He uses the example of engineers and programmers who push systems to their limits, breaking them to learn about them. Kelly also warns against creating a culture (e.g., school system) that punishes failure harshly, because this inhibits a creative process, and risks teaching people not to communicate important failures with others (e.g., null results).

Internet memes

During the early 2000s, the term fail began to be used as an interjection in the context of Internet memes. The interjection fail and the superlative form epic fail expressed derision and ridicule for mistakes deemed "eminently mockable". According to linguist Ben Zimmer, the most probable origin of this usage is Blazing Star (1998), a Japanese video game whose game over message was translated into English as "You fail it". The comedy website Fail Blog, launched in January 2008, featured photos and videos captioned with "fail" and its variations. The #fail hashtag is used on the microblogging site Twitter to indicate contempt or displeasure, and the image that formerly accompanied the message that the site was overloaded is referred to as the "fail whale".

The term "miserable failure" has also been popularized as a result of a widely known "Google bombing," which caused Google searches for the term to turn up the White House biography of George W. Bush.

See also

References

Notes

1. "Failure - Definition of failure by Merriam-Webster". merriam-webster.com. Archived from the original on 2015-07-16.
2. Hunter, I. Q. (2016-09-08). Cult Film as a Guide to Life: Fandom, Adaptation, and Identity. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN 978-1-62356-897-9.
3. Mathijs, Ernest; Sexton, Jamie (2019-11-22). The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-36223-4.
4. Smith, Amy K.; Bolton, Ruth N.; Wagner, Janet (August 1999). "A Model of Customer Satisfaction with Service Encounters Involving Failure and Recovery". Journal of Marketing Research. 36 (3): 356–372 at 358. doi:10.1177/002224379903600305. ISSN 0022-2437.
5. Wan, Lisa; Chan, Elisa (2019-03-20). "Failure is Not Fatal: Actionable Insights on Service Failure and Recovery for the Hospitality Industry". Boston Hospitality Review. 7 (1). ISSN 2326-0351.
6. Schinske, Jeffrey; Tanner, Kimberly (2014). "Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)". CBE Life Sciences Education. 13 (2): 159–166. doi:10.1187/cbe.CBE-14-03-0054. ISSN 1931-7913. PMC 4041495. PMID 26086649.
7. "THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011 — Page 6". Edge.org. Archived from the original on 2013-12-05. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
8. ^ Zimmer, Ben (August 7, 2009). "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 27, 2017. Retrieved August 9, 2009.
9. Schofield, Jack (17 October 2008). "All your FAIL are belong to us". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 4 December 2013. Retrieved August 9, 2009.
10. Beam, Christopher (2008-10-15). "Epic Win". Slate. Archived from the original on 2009-08-25. Retrieved 2009-08-21.
11. Malik, Asmaa (24 April 2010). "Joy in the failure of others has gone competitive". Montreal Gazette. Retrieved 21 May 2010.
12. Mikkelson, Barbara; Mikkelson, David P. (August 13, 2007). "Someone Set Us Up The Google Bomb". Snopes.com. Retrieved August 9, 2009.

Further reading

• Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Paperback reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-691-00412-9
• Sandage, Scott A. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-674-01510-X, ISBN 0-674-02107-X

External links

• Designing Building Failures
• Zimmer, Ben (August 7, 2009), "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection", The New York Times Magazine.
• Association for the Study of Failure from Japan

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