Failure is Common

Happy Good Friday to everyone out there in Blog Land! On this Good Friday, we are going to talk about products failing, nice way to brighten your day huh?

Last time we brought up the fact that 80% of new product launches fail within the first 3 months.

In 2005, more than 156,000 products debuted in stores globally: one every 3 seconds- 75% of these failed.

Roughly 21,000 new brands are introduced worldwide per year-52% of these will fail.

Let's look back to 2001. A product was generating so much buzz that web-sites were offering that it would transform the

transportation industry. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, stated that cities would be built around it. John Doerr, venture capitalist, predicted $1 billion in sales. A factory in New England prepared to assemble 40,000 units a month, for this product, that didn't even have a name.

In December of 2001, the Segway Personal Transporter (PT for short) was released.

The First three were auctioned off for more than $100,000 a piece. And two years later: only 6,000 Segways had been sold.

You remember new coke?

It actually did well in consumer research, but once it hit the stores, it tanked...big time. Less than three months later, Peter Jennings interrupted regular programming to share the news that Coca-Cola was returning to it's original formula.

If we are going to pick on Coca-Cola, let's pick on Pepsi. In 1992, Crystal Pepsi was released, and I sure you all remember the Val Helen "Right Now" theme song.

Crystal Pepsi tanked so bad that Saturday Night created a spoof, which according to many, is in the top 20 of best SNL commercial spoofs


via videosift.com

One final flop comes from the Video Game world. After the huge success of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial movie, Atari rushed to produce E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game) for the Atari 2600 video game console in 1982. The game is often cited as of the largest commercial failures in video gaming history, as well as one of the worst video games released. E.T. the video game is often blamed as a contributing factor to Atari's massive losses during 1983 and 1984.

Overproduction, returns and unsold cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill.

Marketing professionals sometimes know little more than John Wanamaker did a century ago when he declared: "Half my advertising budget is wasted. Trouble is, I don't know which half"

Products and brands have become like flies, a buzz in the background being continuously batted by consumers.

Next blog we will talk about the solution It is called Neuromarketing. It is the marriage of marketing and science - the window into the human mind. It is helping to reveal why and what advertising messages are remembered and what messages are forgotten.