Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [29]
Very truly yours,
L F Desmond, General Sales Manager Dodge Division
The experiment was a complete failure. The dealers that decided to order La Femme found that the cars sat unsold in the showroom.
Unperturbed, Dodge tried again the following year. But still it had no takers. Women found the crude attempts to attract their attention rather patronizing. This was, after all, appealing to a classic male ideal of femininity, rather than how the 1950s woman actually saw herself. There simply weren’t enough women who wanted a pink and purple car with matching lipstick holders and combs.
Lesson from La Femme
Don’t patronize your customers. It didn’t work in the 1950s, and it certainly doesn’t work now.
14 Radion
Bright orange boxes aren’t enough
Many of the brands in this section have failed because they were too far away from what the consumer wanted, but sometimes products fail because they aren’t different enough from other popular products. This is certainly the case of Radion washing powder. Along with Pear’s Soap, Radion was one of the many Unilever brands for the chop when the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate announced it would be narrowing its scope on 400 ‘power’ brands.
Launched 10 years before the February 2000 announcement, Radion had struggled to capture just over 2 per cent of the UK detergent market. One of the reasons for this, as with most brand failures, is that the public’s perception of the brand was far from clear.
Although the product’s vibrant design (Radion came in shocking orange packets) meant that the brand was easily identifiable on supermarket shelves, consumers were less than sure why they should buy it. It wasn’t the cheapest, it wasn’t considered the best quality, it wasn’t the oldest or the original. It was simply the brand with the brightest packaging. And that, in the end, is rarely enough.
Unilever’s final decision was to amalgamate Radion into its brand, and it continues under the banner Surf Fun Fresh.
Lesson from Radion
Be different. Brands need to have a strong point of difference from their competition. After all, this is the very point of branding in the first place. Garish packaging was not enough to win over consumers.
15 Clairol’s ‘Touch of Yoghurt’ shampoo
Launched in 1979, Clairol’s yoghurt-based shampoo failed to attract customers largely because nobody liked the idea of washing their hair with yoghurt. Of those who did buy the product, there were even some cases of people mistakenly eating it, and getting very ill as a result. The ‘Touch of Yoghurt’ concept is made even more remarkable by the introduction three years earlier by Clairol of a similar shampoo called the ‘Look of Buttermilk.’ This product had instantly bombed in test markets where consumers were left asking: what exactly is the ‘look of buttermilk’ and why should I want it?
16 Pepsi AM
In the late 1980s, Pepsi spotted a previously unexploited consumer: the breakfast cola drinker. Although Pepsi hadn’t conducted much comprehensive market research into this area, the company realized that many young adults were drinking caffeinated cola rather than coffee for breakfast. They therefore came up with Pepsi AM, a drink ‘with all the sugar and twice the caffeine.’
Unfortunately, Pepsi had failed to appreciate that although some people drank Pepsi for breakfast, there was no specific demand for a new sub-brand centred around that usage. ‘If a consumer doesn’t know he [or she] has a need, it’s hard to offer a solution,’ says brand expert and marketing author Robert McMath. ‘Sometimes a company can manufacture a need – but it’s expensive that way.’
Nobody knew they wanted Pepsi AM, so nobody bought it. Furthermore, many marketing experts have successfully argued that because its name dictated when the product should be consumed, the market size was restricted to specific-occasion