Over the years, there have been a number of products that failed because of marketing mistakes. Some of these products may have even been a big hit had their marketing campaigns been better. The importance of a good marketing campaign can not be stressed enough, because according to Diogenes Laertius, “Nothing can be produced out of nothing”
(Source: Quotery.com). Sometimes, finding the best mailing list brokers is all you need to jump start a marketing campaign. Other times, a poorly chosen mailing list broker may be a company’s undoing. That being said, some marketing ideas are just so bad that they are doomed to fail from the start.
Here are a few of the worst marketing mistakes in history!
Ayds Diet Candy
All you have to do is look at the name to see why this is one of the worst marketing mistakes in history. To make matters even worse, this diet candy came out in the ’70s, which was a time when the AIDS disease was really starting to get a lot of public attention and scaring people all over the world. On top of this, poorly targeted mail advertisements were mailed out to people who were actually suffering from AIDS. The last thing these people wanted to see was an Ayds diet candy that helped them lose weight, which was something the AIDS disease was already causing.
DIVX
Remember DIVX? Not DivX the video codec but DIVX! Don’t worry if you do not remember; most people don’t. This was a poor marketing attempt by Circuit City in the ’90s as an alternative to video rentals. At the time, Circuit City believed so much in DIVX that it put more than $114 million into this idea. Believe it or not, DIVX was not much different from DVD. The only difference was that you could purchase a disc for a few dollars. Once you watched the video, it would be playable for just 48 hours. After that, you would have to purchase more play time. Maybe the worst thing about DIVX was the fact that it tied up your phone line while you were watching a movie. After all, in the ’90s, connecting to the Internet was done almost exclusively via phone lines. In the end, DVD won this battle. A lot of this had to do with the fact that the marketing campaign for DIVX left consumers feeling confused. People found it easier to simply buy a DVD that they could watch as much as they wanted after purchasing it.
New Coke
If this is not one of the worst marketing mistakes in history, nothing is. New Coke was an attempt by the Coca-Cola company to mess with the classic Coke formula. Why was this such a bad marketing idea? Coca-Cola decided to celebrate a product that had been around for years by completely changing its taste. It also confused people because the product was known as the “new taste of coke,” and that is how it got its name “New Coke.” The product was actually just called Coke. Later on, they changed the name of the product to Coca-Cola II, but the damage had already been done. It was not until the company reintroduced its old formal under the name “Coca-Cola Classic” that it saw a rise in sales. The lesson here is: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That being said, things did work out in Coca-Cola’s favor.
Qwikster
Qwikster was a poor attempt by Netflix to split its services into two brands. One would be Netflix, from which people could stream movies over the Internet; and the second was going to be Qwikster, from which people could get DVDs via the mail. This was an attempt by the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, to hurry people’s adoption of the streaming-only service. The idea was not well-received, and the company pulled the idea just three weeks later. Hastings even took to his Facebook to say that he was going to need a “food taster” to check for poison in his food after the responses he got from the public.
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Written by Robert Cordray,
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