Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [23]
Pepsi-Cola made a poor choice. It picked red and blue as the brand’s colours. Red to symbolise cola and blue to differentiate the brand from Coca-Cola. For years Pepsi has struggled with a less-than-ideal response to Coke’s colour strategy.
Recently, though, Pepsi has sacrificed red for mainly blue to create a stronger distinction between the two leading brands. Now Coca-Cola equals red and Pepsi equals blue.
Lessons from Pepsi
Don’t assume that gaps should always be filled. If you spot a hole in the market, it doesn’t mean that you should fill it. Just because clear cola didn’t exist, it didn’t mean it had to be invented. However, the previous success the company had with its Diet Pepsi product (the first cola of its kind) had convinced Pepsi that there were more gaps to fill.
Don’t relaunch a failed product. Crystal failed once, but Pepsi still believed the world was crying out for a clear cola. The second version fared even worse than the first.
Differentiate yourself from your main competitor. For years Pepsi’s visual identity was diluted through its red and blue branding.
9 Earring Magic Ken
When Barbie’s boyfriend came out of the closet
Among toys, Mattel’s Barbie is something of a legend. Since her arrival on the scene at the annual Toy Fair in New York in 1959, Barbie has appealed to several different generations of girls. One of the keys to her longevity has been her ability to move with the times. In the 1980s, for instance, Barbie wore shoulder pads and became an aerobics instructor. According to the Barbie Web site, she has always set a successful example: ‘She has been a role model to women as an astronaut, a college graduate, a surgeon, a business executive, an airline pilot, a presidential candidate and a dentist.’
However, on her road to international superstardom Barbie has experienced a number of setbacks. For instance, when the doll launched in Japan sales were poor owing to the fact that Japanese parents thought her breasts were too large. Mattel addressed the problem and a year later a flatter-chested version emerged.
Then there’s Ken, Barbie’s perma-tanned boyfriend. Like Barbie herself, Ken has been made-over a number of times since his ‘birth’ in 1961. The most controversial of these incarnations occurred in 1993 with the arrival of ‘Earring Magic Ken’ or, as he became publicly known, ‘New Ken.’ This was, to put it mildly, a radical new look for the doll. Gone were the tuxedos of old, and in came a mesh T-shirt, a purple leather vest and a left-side earring. ‘It would seem Mattel’s crack Ken redesign team spent a weekend in LA or New York, dashing from rave to rave, taking notes and Polaroids,’ one journalist wrote at the time of the launch.
Mattel explained that the new look was an effort to bring Ken up to date. ‘We did a survey where we asked girls if Barbie should get a new boyfriend or stick with Ken,’ explained Lisa McKendall, Mattel’s manager of marketing and communications. ‘They wanted her to stay with Ken, but wanted him to look... cooler.’
However, pretty soon ‘New Ken’ was being dubbed ‘Gay Ken’. The New York Times, CNN, People magazine and talk-show host Jay Leno saw the doll as a symbol of shifting gender and sexual identities and values. Ken, whose apparent purpose in life was to help define the conventional ideal of masculinity for generations of young girls, had apparently come out of the closet.
This hadn’t been Mattel’s intention. ‘Ken and Barbie both reflect mainstream society,’ said Lisa McKendall. ‘They reflect what little girls see in their world – what they see their dads, brothers and uncles wearing they want Ken to wear.’
Of course, Mattel was now positioned ‘between a rock and a hard place’. A ‘gay’ doll aimed at children was not going to do them any favours among middle America. However, if they acted too appalled by the associations they risked being accused of homophobia.