I need to do something for a project. I need to name TEN of the biggest “Brand” failures.
I’m trying to think of a few.
So far I got
The McArch from McDonalds
New Coke
The Edsel
Sony’s Betamax
They don’t have to be products, they could be ideas that didn’t work, in a big way, or rebranding failures
Any more ideas would be appreciated
Clayton’s was a non-alcoholic whiskey 
that was marketed in Australia about 20 years ago (possibly only in West Australia). The idea was to provide an alternative for alcoholics. They had a slogan that was something like “It’s the drink you have when you aren’t drinking.”
You mean the Arch Deluxe?
Crystal Pepsi
Considering as it was supposed to be a revolutionary product that changed the way mankind moved, I would have to say that the Segway was a pretty big bust. They invented something that goes slower than a moped, you can’t sit on, and is harder to make. :smack:
The NBA made a bigt fuss about going to a new ball this year. Players hated it, so the league went back to the old ball…
Coca-Cola tried introducing it’s Dasani water brand into the UK, but faced criticism when it was revealed that it was essentially tapwater. The final straw was when illegal concentrations of bromate were found in it. The product was withdrawn.Story here. .
Back in the 60’s there was cigarette brand sold in the UK by the name of “Strand”. The TV adverts for this showed a man walking on his own down a deserted street, stopping and lighting up. The voice-over then intoned “you’re never alone with a Strand”. These cigarettes were perceived by the general public as being only for lonely, solitary people. They did not sell and soon disappeared off the market.
Anyone remember the Sinclair C5?
Alamo Rent A Car made a big splash with the redesigned rental offices. They would have everything including children’s playgrounds and concession stands.
Unfortunately, the one thing they didn’ have was speed of service. People didn’t want to wait for an hour in the rental car office. Seeing the playgrounds and concession stands made the customers realize that the business expected them to have to wait in line for an hour!
There were the Bricklin and DeLorean automobiles. Both were flashy, expensive sports cars, and both were not very good sports cars. Both companies went belly-up.
Really. I don’t keep up with that kind of thing (is that a sport?) But what was the purported reason for the “new” ball, and what was wrong with the current incarnation?
General Motors’s Pontiac division had the Fiero, which failed for a handful of reasons. It was an adventurous move for the stodgy GenMot. It was supposed to hit the market about the time a big slump hit the auto industry. Timid GenMot put it on hiatus for a few years, a big blunder.
It gave Toyota a chance to roar past. By the time the somewhat radical mid-engine two-seater Fiero hit the streets, it was competing with the nearly identical Toyota MR2. Identical in looks only, it turned out. The Mister Two was better in several ways; it had more power, it handled better, and it didn’t have the Fiero’s pesky tendency to overheat and catch fire.
It was a great idea, poorly done.
Let’s not forget the Tucker.
The old basketball was made of leather. The new ball was made of microfiber cloth, cut into two plus-shaped pieces. The players reported that the traction changed as the ball got sweaty during the game. I don’t remember if it started sticky and turned slick, or vice versa. When the players started to get cuts on their hands, the league decided to revert to the old 8-panel leather ball.
Quadrophonic sound didn’t go anywhere in the '70s, due to a number of factors. There were several competing, incompatible formats (e.g. SQ, QS, Discrete, Matrix, etc.). You had to buy a special amplifier to decode the signals, four speakers, a turntable with a special cartridge and special stylus, and buy the special records to play on it. Or you could listen to 4-channel from 8-track cartridges, which were worthless for quality audio reproduction from the start. I never knew anyone who had such a system back then, and I’ve still never heard what multichannel sound sounds like. And I’m an audio guy who has worked with sound equipment for decades!
The videophone died a quiet, unceremonious death, too, before it went anywhere.
DAT (Digital Audio Tape)
Wouldn’t you know, someone has written a book on the subject. Brand Failures: The truth behind the 100 biggest marketing mistakes of all time
A reviewer at Amazon said, in part, “Haig organizes these 100 “failures” into ten types, each with its own moral and admonition. These types include classic failures (e.g., New Coke), idea failures (e.g., R.J. Reynolds’ smokeless cigarettes), extension failures (e.g., Harley Davidson perfume), culture failures (e.g., Kelloggs in India), and technology failures (e.g., Pets.com).”
Sounds pretty interesting, actually, though the reviewer also said it was more useful as a cultural artifact than as practical marketing advice.
Ah, here’s one I remember. Article on Wolfgang Puck’s self-heating coffee cans.
I can’t speak for the whole country, but this came in with a bang at our local supermarket in 2004, and in just a couple of months, they were heavily discounted, and then gone.
Liked the concept, sort of. Self-heating let you pack it away cold and take it with you to places where it was impossible or inconvenient to get fresh coffee. On the other hand, so did a good Thermos. And the Puck coffee was expensive and took six whole minutes to heat.
By contrast: open Thermos, pour, and — voila!— hot coffee instantly available.
Concept failure AND brand extension failure. Mr. Puck’s a marketable gourmet chef; not particularly associated in customer’s minds with coffee.
DAT wasn’t a technical failure; it got hamstrung by the first iteration of the dreaded DRM Attack Lawyer Syndrome, where content owners wanted to cripple the device to make it obey their version of how copyright should act. The resulting delays and uncertainty caused the devices to miss their optimum consumer market introduction. They were still quite successful in the professional realm, until they were superseded by hard-disk recording.
Several generations of devices later, we are still watching content owners try to cripple new devices. IMHO, this is a major reason why Sony is in trouble: its content-owner half imposed restrictions on the devices that its hardware-builder half designs. Combined with Sony’s desire to introduce new formats, this led to crippled formats that were not taken up as quickly as they could have been. Minidisc and Memory Stick, I’m looking at you!
Minidisc especially. Again, it was technically successful, but had arbitrary restrictions added that worked against it becoming a consumer success.
For instance, MD data discs for computers would not work in MD music recorders, and vice versa. This required that two types of discs be available in stores, and killed Sony’s chance to create a 120-megabyte successor to the floppy disc at a time, just before cheap CD-Rs, when there was an opening for this. Even in North America, MD music discs made a substantial effort and maintained a presence; if they could have been used in computers, that would have made the survival of the MD Data format much more likely.