Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [36]
The fact that Procter & Gamble hasn’t always been focusing on tooth decay has meant that it has inevitably suffered from something even worse: brand decay. Unless the company can once again take control of the scientific high ground and provide consumers with a single, consistent message (assisted with a tightly-focused range), Colgate will have won the battle by more than the skin of its teeth.
Lessons from Crest
Don’t confuse the customer. Procter & Gamble now realizes that simplicity is the key to reassuring shoppers. ‘It’s mind-boggling how difficult we’ve made it for them over the years,’ admitted Procter & Gamble’s president Durk I Jager to Business Week magazine.
Don’t offer too many products. Just 7.6 per cent of all personal care and household products account for 84.5 per cent of sales, according to research by the consulting firm Kurt Salmon Associates. The same research discovered that almost a quarter of the products in a typical supermarket sell fewer than one unit a month.
Remove product duplicates. Another study, published by William Bishop Consulting, found that when duplicative items were removed, 80 per cent of consumers saw no difference.
Be transparent. Brands should aim for ‘transparency’. In other words, they should make the choice on offer completely clear.
Remember your heritage. ‘Never lose your corporate memory,’ advises Jack Trout in Big Brands, Big Trouble. Crest suffered from brand amnesia by failing to replicate the success of its ‘Triumph Over Tartar’ campaign of the 1950s.
23 Heinz All Natural Cleaning Vinegar
Confusing the customer
By 2010 HJ Heinz Company was a $10 billion global company, with products enjoying first or second place, in terms of market share, in more than 50 countries.
Heinz’s All Natural Cleaning Vinegar was the food-maker’s first non-food item. The company, which had been founded by Henry Heinz in 1869, had made its name selling its ‘57 Varieties’ – good value, pre-packaged food such as baked beans, soup and ketchup – and decided in the 1980s to extend its brand into other household goods.
First off the mark was the All Natural Cleaning Vinegar, an eco-friendly all-purpose vinegar carrying a red symbol with the words ‘Heloise’s Most Helpful Hint’. Heloise is the US newspaper columnist responsible for the ‘Hints from Heloise’ column, which is syndicated across the globe. It was a logical endorsement as Heloise had long been an advocate of the various and miraculous uses of vinegar – as a rust remover, deodorizer, window cleaner, ant detergent, weed killer and defroster. In addition to this support, the product also received a substantial amount of positive PR from the press, which had picked up on the green angle of the product.
None of this mattered though. The product was a complete flop and never appeared beyond the United States.
When marketing commentators attempted to explain why the vinegar had failed to take off, they blamed the ‘alternative’ perception of the new product. In her 1998 book, Green Marketing: Opportunity for Innovation Jacquelyn Ottman uses the case of the Heinz All Natural Cleaning Vinegar to illustrate the changing market attitudes towards environmentally-friendly products: ‘With green a moving target, planning gets tricky; industry can only respond as quickly as the market demands. This poses the risk of rushing greener products to market to serve the demands of influential customers while mass consumers may be unaware of the need for change. The green marketplace is rife with examples of less than perfect timing.’
Ottman then goes on in depth to explain why she believes the Heinz product failed:
Introduced in response to the newly discovered need of chemophobics, Heinz’s Cleaning Vinegar, a double-strength version of the normal product, flopped when introduced into supermarkets as