Are there any products genuinely released with the intention of failure (or intentionally limited success)?
The classic (ha, ha) example would be New Coke, which some would claim was an intentional failure to gloss over the transition of Coke from sugar to HFCS and change the “Coke vs Pepsi” debate into “Coke vs Coke.” But I’m inclined to believe that one really was just a bad call from Coke respun extremely well.
Some of the more recent sodas I’ve seen, like the undrinkable Coke Blak and some of the oodles of recolored Mountain Dew, I suspect are released with no real plans of being successful in their own right, but instead giving consumers something new to try but to ultimately drive them back to the main brand.
Sometimes, musical artists record intentionally bad albums as a way of getting back at their label, who is forcing them to record another album, under conditions that the artist considers a crappy deal, to fulfill a contract. Many of them do not, preferring to phone it in with mediocrity, but occasionally it does rise to overt sabotage.
I could see how Coke might bring out Blak or Whyt or Purpl Coke to keep the main brand out there if Pepsi is gaining on them in market share more than just to capture some novelty appeal which may or may not be there.
Is a retail product ever introduced, à la The Producers, purely to generate a tax loss?
The Rolling Stones did something similar in 1970, when Decca Records claimed they owed them one additional song to complete their contract (the Stones were leaving, going to a new record company).
So the Stones fulfilled the contract requirements by providing them with the master tape of a new song, Cocksucker Blues. But oddly enough, Decca executives declined to release it. (It was eventually released about 15 years later. by a German company.)
But is isn’t just a lackluster, phone-in performance – actually a fairly good performance by Jagger & Richards – simple, elegant, and seemingly heartfelt!
When I worked as an engineer for Motorola in the mid 1980s, there were some products that were developed that were known in advance to have very little chance to be a success. What they would do to see which new technologies would work is to put them all into a single product. The new product would look really cool and cutting edge which attracted the early adopters. There was no way that all of the new technologies would work, so the product would most likely be a dog. Some of the new technologies would work, though, and those would be put into other products which would be pretty good.
Sometimes this can result in an unexpected hit. For instance, Quiet Riot was pressured by their label to cover Slade’s “Cum on Feel the Noize”, so they intentionally recorded a really bad version, hoping the record label wouldn’t put it on the album. Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately) their worst effort sounded pretty damn cool, so they released it anyway, and ended up with a #1 single.
A moderately famous one, which involved fellow SDMB member RealityChuck, was the book Atlanta Nights.
It accomplished its goal, so it wasn’t strictly speaking a failure, but the book was atrocious by design.
In the sports world, it is alleged that teams with bad records intentionally dump games to improve their draft position. Also, there are instances of players doing peculiar things to run out the clock towards the end of games to run out the clock rather than trying to score.
Yeah, I work in the industry, and I have a very, VERY hard time believing the theory that New Coke was anything other than a colossal mistake by Coca-Cola. They were so obsessed with blunting Pepsi’s advancing market share that they developed a blind spot regarding their taste-test research – they wanted to beat Papsi in blind testing, and didn’t spend enough time / effort worrying about the impact on their current users.
The Producers didn’t involve a tax loss, it involved collecting investors’ money, squandering a fraction of it on a poor product, claiming a massive loss, then pocketing the part they didn’t spend.
Nobody ever fails deliberately just to generate a tax loss. Losses are often timed to offset gains on other investments in the same tax year (for example, choosing when to sell stock that has gone down but will never recover, like FNM), but it never makes sense to lose a million dollars to be able to reduce your taxes by a few hundred thousand.
I think the Mountain Dew flavors are an intentional marketing plan- you have Mountain Dew (original radioactive green) as the “flagship”, then periodic similar sweet, sour and fruity caffeinated drinks sold under the Mountain Dew brand.
It’s no different than fast food restaurants selling some limited-time variant hamburger/chicken salad/taco/whatever. They may not even be failures; they may just be removed when time’s up so as to generate more demand the next time around.
I know that I look forward to Whataburger bringing back the A1 Thick & Hearty burger, and Taco Cabana’s brisket tacos, and I know I’m not the only one, since they’ve been around 2-3 times so far.
I think the plan isn’t intentional failure, but rather something different enough to ramp up the marketing around- it’s a little hard to get people excited about plain 40 year old Mountain Dew, but they can get them riled up about Mountain Dew Plutonium Purple, and ultimately, it’s all Mountain Dew.
I suspect if the periodic ones kicked enough ass, they might be on the permanent menu/product lineup.
It seems to be common practice in the tech industry to release “intentional failures”. Any successful product, or product category, has to have some failed predecessors to test the waters. Before “standard” laptops were around, for example, there were some failures like the Atari STacy and Macintosh Portable, which followed earlier, weirder machines like the Osborne 1. Most of these were never considered candidates for success. Similarly, successful smartphones, tablets, and even personal computers had unsuccessful antecedents.
It’s not the same thing, but I’d be willing to believe that some of the dotcom companies that were started during the 1999-2001 timeframe didn’t expect to succeed, given how ridiculous some of the business plans were. And yet they were all able to raise tens of millions in VC money. (One of them could have pulled a Producers-style prank and just embezzled part of the invested capital.)
My understanding of multiple brand variants is that it allows a brand to dominate more shelf space at the retail point. Thus, a brand is willing to tolerate a poor performer because it crowds out the competition and gives them a larger presence to the consumer.
The various incarnations of Coke and Pepsi are obvious examples, but IMO the most blatant example–considering the size of the market–is Cheez-Its. The next time you’re in the supermarket, check out the snack cracker aisle and the enormous number of variants–none of which, IMO, improve the core product in any way, but it sure makes it a lot harder to find competitors. Personally, the original Cheez-Its are perfect as-is, so I don’t really care if weak substitutes like Cheez Nips lose out, though I am annoyed that I have to rummage thru tabasco flavored, garlic flavored, white cheedar, reduced fat, and a plethora of other obscure variants to find the one I want.
How are experiments not intentional failures? You release an experimental product, not intending it to be anything but a failure commercially, in order to build on the technology/features for later products. An intentional failure with a purpose is still an intentional failure.
In addition, there’s the Major League scenario where a team tanks a whole season to drive down attendance thereby giving the owners an excuse to move the franchise to a new city on grounds of lack of fan support. This was strongly suspected as happening during the Supersonics’ last season in Seattle before they moved to Oklahoma City.
Due to oddities in recent German tax laws, if you set things up right, a movie that lost money could produce a net tax advantage. Hence several Uwe Boll films.
I don’t know about the the others, but I wouldn’t call the Osborne 1 a failure. It didn’t come from a company who could afford it, it sold pretty well, and it got lots of press, basically establishing the portable market. Its clunkiness was due to the technology, not trying to fail. Osborne crashed and burned when they announced the next generation too early. Everyone stopped buying the previous generation, and when they couldn’t ship the new product their revenues dried up.
BTW, Adam Osborne participated in a conference on “Problems of the '80s” my adviser put on in 1978. Osborne was still in publishing then, but the reports he and Portia Isaacson put out came true to a much greater extent than those of the other participants, especially the IBM mainframe people. It was clear that he was thinking about portable computing even back then.