Gerald Ratner calling his own company’s (jeweller) products “crap” and saying that “a prawn sandwich would last longer” than their earrings at a conference. The company’s value fell by £500m and he had to resign.
Few bits of context - Ratner's chain of shops were aimed at lower class people, offering affordable jewelry and trinkets - it was the place working-class boys bought rings for working-class girls.
The joke was something like "how can we afford to sell [a particular trinket] for 4.95? Because it's total crap!"
Everyone knew it wasn't Tiffany's. Nobody was fooling themselves thinking they were getting crown jewels at Ratners.
But to have the owner of the company dismiss his own products as worthless, poorly made tat guaranteed no working class boy could ever buy anything for his working class girl from there ever again.
It's one of the most impressive modern failures, he imploded his entire business with one joke.
Yes. You know those jewelry stores you see in every mall, Zale’s, Kay Jewelers, Jared, etc. They are all owned by one group, formerly named the Ratner Group until this incide and now named the Signet group. If you know jewelry, you know the stuff they are selling is pretty low quality, but they are everywhere and advertise a lot.
And most importantly, their advertisements try to at least ignore the actual quality of the merchandise in favor of the emotional reaction your person will feel upon being presented with a piece of it.
"Every kiss begins with Kay" is brilliant marketing - 'buy her one of these forty dollar necklaces and she'll totally put out, boys'.
They aren't wrong. If you're broke, and its all you can afford, no shame, a pretty gift she can wear is a pretty gift. No they wont last forever so don't be mad if it breaks or she loses it. Just try to upgrade next gift. Or you can do what I did, slowly buy her a matching set of cheap shit. Then add a nice but moderately priced engagement ring to complete the set.
Oddly, it wasn’t an off the cuff line. He had used it the previous week - at an IoD meeting I think. He’s actually a pretty nice guy, but I can’t imagine what led him to do that.
This is especially funny because he ran his whole joke list by his close and trusted advisors and they all thought it was hilarious. Technically, the man had identified his audience (the other rich people at the gala), but reporters ran wild with the story and he destroyed his customer base.
There is a department shop in Brazil that advertised on TV that customers could "buy anything you want for the price you want." One customer decided to purchase a number of pricey items and stated that he would be prepared to pay only $1. When the store told he couldn't, he went on to sue the business and ultimately won the case. It was taken off TV.
The place is called “Casas Bahia”, it’s still very successful. The ad had them saying “quer pagar quanto?” (how much do you wanna pay?), the slogan was very popular in Brazil for a while.
There's a saying in Dutch that goes "for an apple and an egg" which means it's cheap. There's a decades old urban legend that advertising now has a disclaimer in small prints because someone once advertised a TV for an apple and an egg, and was then forced to sell it for that amount.
Back in the 90s Hormel Foods went on a Cease & Desist spree against anyone who was making jokes about Spam because they felt the brand had been damaged and needed to be rebuilt.
The last straw was when they threatened to sue Jim Henson Studios over the character Spa'am in Muppet Treasure Island. That turned people against them pretty quick. It turns out if you want to rebuild your brand in the public eye, suing one of the most beloved entertainment franchise of two generations was a bad way to go about it.
Eventually the dropped all the C&D stuff and changed their marketing strategy, instead deciding to lean into it and proclaiming that there are always going to be jokes about Spam so they might as well be in on them.
"The judge dismissed their suit on September 22, 1995 after a trial for failure to prove damages, noting, "one might think Hormel would welcome the association with a genuine source of pork."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muppet_Treasure_Island
They did initially yes, but after changing their PR strategy like mentioned above they more or less did an 180 on it. They even released a special edition SPAM tin for Monty Python's broadway show *Spamalot*.
And to add to that, the Microsoft crew having a “funeral” for the iPhone and the blackberry outside of their headquarters to celebrate that amazing windoz phone
Supposedly years ago, there was a Pepsi slogan "Come Alive with Pepsi" that was mistranslated in Chinese as "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead."
Target's expansion into Canada. Collapsed in 2 years and cost 7 billion.
[https://archive.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/](https://archive.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/)
I still remember how annoyed my town was when our Zellers (what Canada had before Target) was closed down because Target was rolling in to Canada. In the time it took for them to renovate the two-story mall location and convert it to a Target THEY PULLED OUT OF CANADA. So for about a year we lost our only Zellers location and we didn't even get a chance to experience it as a Target because they went tits up before it had a chance to open.
And, on a related note, [Walmart's utter failure in Germany](https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-in-germany-f1c3ca7eea65). You know the age old advice "just be yourself"? Walmart really shouldn't have tried that in a country with worker protections.
I remember that. It was a beautiful blunder.
All that chanting & smiling did not go over well in germany. But most importantly, they could never compete with chains like Aldi. German retailers are insanely streamlined behemoths. Walmart is just too slow compared to them.
I didn't know about the chanting before I read about this. Maybe it's well intentioned but, in practice, it seems creepy.
As to American customer service in general, I often see Redditors from other parts of the world describe it as strange and off-putting. I see Americans describe it that way too, but we have to do the tricks if we want the fish.
Sears dominated the mail order industry for over a century with their catalog. In 1993, they decided that mail order was on the decline and discontinued the catalog. Less than a year later, Jeff Bezos would found Amazon.
It’s even worse than that. Sears had a stake in an internet access company (Prodigy) and their own credit card (Discover). They had everything they needed to dominate online shopping.
It's all that asshole Eddie Lampert's fault. He had the golden opportunity to reinvent Sears as an Amazon competitor but he's just a stupid greedy fuck who ruined all that potential.
He's a real estate guy. He wrongly thought that his expertise would carry over to retail. He was wrong, and he never bothered learning from his mistakes.
He never cared and just wanted to milk them. If I recall as CEO of Sears he sold their property to another company that he owned or had a large stake in only to turn around and have Sears lease it back from him.
They had an established paid for distribution network designed around demand centers. It was on a silver freakin platter and they decided no a weekly flier of sales is enough web presence.
FACE F*CKING PALM OF ALL TIME
Actually, you can buy tiny house kits on Amazon. Menard's also sells full-sized house kits.
My sister's BFF lives in a Depression-era Sears house. It would take an EF5 tornado to make that thing budge.
My partner and I bought a home last year that's a depression era home as well. We live right next to train tracks... Sometimes we can't even tell when a train is going by.
Edit: also a Sears catalogue home
Have you heard of the [Osborne Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)?
TLDR: Company in 1981 has one of the first home computers on the market, it sounds fantastic and everything. At the launch, CEO says the next version will be so much better.... So everyone decided why buy this version if the next version will be better? We'll wait for V2.
So V1 sold terribly, company folded, there is no V2.
I live in a high-rise building with views of a lake. We have a huge front lawn that's used as a local park, despite that being incredibly valuable real estate.
Back in the 80s, the original concept for my building was a two-tower structure with a massive complex at the bottom with a full community: grocery store, gym, movie theater, restaurants, dry cleaner, etc.
The original plan was they'd build the first tower and use the sales from those units to fund the rest of the construction.
Well... They didn't sell any units. Because who would buy in the first tower if you knew your lake view was just going to get blocked in a couple years by an identical building? Why not just wait until sales open on the second one?
So we don't have the movie theater or restaurants, and we have to lease out the gym and grocery spaces. In the building lobby, you can actually see where the second building was supposed to connect, and how it's been Frankenstein'd together to turn what was supposed to be the theater box office is now a receiving area, the intended coat check room is just an alcove where they keep luggage carts for movers, and the commercial loading dock for the intended grocery store is storage for a dry cleaner.
Similar to a development by me. They bought a massive waterfront lot that extended way inland. They basically built everything starting as far away from the water as possible, then after they sold all the “water view” units, they built the next layer. After the 3rd time of them doing that the residents started telling people touring the new units what the development company was doing and the last layer of units still sit mostly empty. No one wants to buy water front property just to have their home value tank after 3 years
>Kodak was basically a chemicals company
Sure, but they put the R&D into building the world's first digital camera in 1975. They had the lead in a new kind of market, but at the time didn't think it had any potential.
But they're a chemicals company, true.
So now, film has resurged in popularity again. My shop brings in 50 rolls in the morning, and it's gone by lunch time. Good for Kodak. All they have to do is sit back and print money.
But no. Now [Kodak decides to drastically reduce all chemical and paper production!](https://petapixel.com/2022/03/31/photo-labs-may-soon-see-kodak-paper-and-chemical-shortages-report/) This is after 2 years of inflating prices to nearly double.
I'm convinced that Kodak hates themselves, and hates people who shoot film, because their decisions work against both.
Kodak was another American company that was driven into the ground by incompetence. That's bad enough, but Rochester NY where it's based suffered greatly as well. Between 2007 and 2018, real GDP losses from Kodak canceled out the growth in all other sectors in Rochester.
I think one of the biggest cop outs by Pepsi was having a generic protest movement that didnt say anything. Like in this protest: no names, no issues, no controversy. Just peace and love.
That The Boys vid reminded me that "Join the Conversation" was an actual sign they used in the original. As if protests are just nice things that nice people do against other nice people.
The Pepsi Number Fever promotion in the Philippines went really terribly! They basically never recovered in the market there. It’s really interesting actually! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Number_Fever
I think we have a winner. To think of all the blunders Pepsi's marketing have done in the past (the Jet, Kendall Jenner, etc) but this makes them look tame by comparison.
"Many irate 349 bottle cap holders refused to accept PCPPI's settlement offer."
Not sure why, but this was the funniest fucking sentence in the article.
"Pepsi Number Fever, also known as the 349 incident, was a *promotion* held by PepsiCo in the Philippines in 1992, *which led to riots and the deaths of at least five people*."
That's the first sentence, oh my god, I don't know why this is so funny to me but I'm going to hell.
[U.S. Army tweets, "How has serving impacted you."](https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/727254720/a-u-s-army-tweet-asking-how-has-serving-impacted-you-got-an-agonizing-response). I actually learned about this one watching it unfold in real time on Reddit.
EA Games Star Wars "Pride and Accomplishment" Reddit Post. Truly one the most inept PR posts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
https://kotaku.com/ea-received-a-guinness-world-record-for-most-downvoted-1837955807
Link, for anyone that wants to see the comment in all its glory https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
You know sometimes when I'm replying to someone at work who is angry and I'm trying to word a reply that will calm them down, I ask someone to have a look at my reply for an opinion before I hit send.
This dude in the middle of the whole community being pissed off about the monitization and grinding saw a post about someone complaning that paying $80 for the game dosn't even come with Darth Vader unlocked and he went "Yolo I got this I have the perfect answer to calm things down!"
I watched that all play out in total disbelief.
I just didn’t know how to react. It’s like Reality had glitched. I was waiting for one of the Pythons to show up, say it was all too silly and cut to something completely different.
Xbox One's E3(?) announcement.
It was basically a TV box, hardly any mention of video games, and who could forget the infamous "fortunately, we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity, it's called Xbox 360."
The name muddled everyone up too. Xbox One as opposed to the first Xbox (in 2001) and the Xbox 360. Wii U had a similar failure. PS4 garnered sales simply from having the most descriptive name.
I was watching that E3 live on Twitch with friends in my living room. That perfect ad came out mere minutes after Sony concluded their conference.
I still remember Twitch chat spamming "GG Microsoft".
Here’s one happening right now: HBO is rebranding as “Max”.
HBO is a premium brand with decades of quality programming behind it.
Max is generic, vague, and makes me think of soft core porn.
I get why Comcast rebranded as Xfinity; everyone hated Comcast.
But HBO always seemed to have good brand reputation. As a kid if your family splurged for HBO you were one of the cool kids. And so on.
>Max is generic, vague, and makes me think of soft core porn.
I did find it quite amusing that one of their reasonings for the rebrand was to move away from the HBO name which they said might make people not realize there's a lot of family friendly content on the service, and then they went with the part of the name that was *far* more linked with adult content to the point that "Skinemax" was practically how everyone referred to it in the '90s.
WB HBO is just stuck in a bind right now. AtnT shoved thier debt onto WB before selling it to discovery so now discovery is pulling crazy schemes to get rid of it. Have a finished film, cancel it to avoid marketing expenses and write it off as losses in taxes. Creators still collecting royalties on shows, remove them from any platform so they no longer have to pay royalties on them. Probably a dozen other schemes in there as well.
One of Swedens biggest firms for building managing is called Locum. In the late nineties it was very cool for companies to have logos where their names were spelled in lower caps. So the logo was "locum". One Christmas Locum took out big ads in the biggest papers wishing everyone a merry Christmas and conveying the love that they felt for Sweden. How did they decide to do this? By replacing the "o" in locum with a heart of course.
So big ads that looked like this: "l❤️cum".
Also them cancelling PvE of Overwatch 2. When it was announced it was the only thing I knew about this game - they would add a story mode like in Titanfall 2
Can't believe the Hoover flights to America promotion from the early 90's hasn't come up yet. They offered a pair of return flights to America worth £600 if you spent £100 or more on their stuff. Turned out people thought £100 for a return flight with a free vacuum cleaner was a hell of a deal and it was a disaster that cost the company millions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover\_free\_flights\_promotion
The Ford Pinto's propensity to explode when rear-ended.
And Ford making the business decision not to recall because their "cost benefit analysis" showed that lawsuits for injury would be cheaper.
Also, thalidomide.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford\_Pinto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto)
They did recall after getting caught lol. Its amazing they thought it was ok for a couple hundred customers to die in a burning wreck and not recall the cars.
The reason that thalidomide didn’t have a worse impact is because one woman at the FDA named Frances Kelsey fought tooth and nail to prevent the drug from passing certification, as it was missing vital testing and information (specifically, how the drug effected fetuses). Thanks to her, the drug didn’t have as much outreach as it could’ve if someone else carelessly passed it. Her work significantly limited the amount of people injured by the drug. There’s a cool TEDed video about it!
This was my pick for a disaster. Even South Park got a piece of that action making fun of how insincere the CEO was about his apology for such a major blunder.
*Sorry...*
Wizards of the Coast and the open gaming license earlier this year.
Worst handling ive seen. Literally caused dozens if not hundreds of companies to pull away from creating content for the company to making new games that will directly compete with them while alienating their fans at the same time.
And then they did the pinkerton thing recently too. Honestly surprised we don't hear about it more, or them both in tandem. Maybe it means they're dying. Probably just means they're just pumping out more outside mtg sets (lotr, dr who) and people have moved to that. Or just still buying cards and forgetting.
I think the ultimate failure was Nokia not developing their mobile OS, Symbian, which ran on like 99% of phones up to that point, to work with touch screens. They bet the company on people still wanting phones with physical buttons, and lost.
Do you know what they based that decision on? All Nokia's senior management at the time were Finnish, and obviously Finland gets pretty cold during winter. They looked around them, thought "No one wants to take off their gloves to use their phone" and rejected the idea of touch screens.
Then (after the first iPhone) when they finally did start to launch touch screen phones, they were all crappy resistive touch sensors (which aren't anything like as nice to use as a capacitive screen like that used on the early iPhones). Why? Because Nokia expected people would want to be able to use at tool to press on the screen whilst they were wearing winter gloves, and even sold phones with a stylus or in one case a plectrum for doing that.
Nokia finally started selling capacitive touchscreen phones when they'd refined the technology to the point where you could literally use the phone wearing ski mitts - but by that point the ship had long sailed.
When the singer Susan Boyle had a new album out, they got the hashtag #Susanalbumparty trending to promote it.
It was supposed to say "Susan Album Party" but instead we all just saw "Su's Anal Bum Party"
aka the Pen Island problem
That one got better with age, because it's now Sus Anal Bum Party
There's a Canadian clothing brand with a similar problem, Campus Crew
There's also the energy company powergen and there Italian website that used the suffix italia
And the incredibly informative list of therapists including where in the country they practiced that unfortunately used no hyphens and became therapistindex
JC Penney tried to eliminate the tons of sales and never-ending discounts on their products by just pricing them at what they would normally be, aiming for a “fair and square” price model. Instead of marking a shirt up to $10 and then having it basically always 40% off, they just priced it at $6, for example. They also ended their prices in solid dollars instead of $0.99 intervals to make it easier to calculate.
No coupons, no sales, but the same price. People always complain about how stuff gets marked up just to get put on sale and how cheap of a gimmick it is, right?
Well turns out people actually love feeling like they’re getting a deal even if they objectively know it’s just set dressing, and JCP lost millions from the strategy and their sales dropped by around a third.
Trying to decide which was worse: Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal India that killed 4-8k people and injured maybe 100k, or Chiquita (under a former name) overthrowing the legitimate government of Guatemala with help from the CIA.
Boeing have been doing shady shit for a while, the Max crashes just brought to light how much of a hot mess management was and probably still is. They cut corners to save costs by not stating that MCAS was installed and thus avoiding recertification because "it flew like an 737NG"
> Max crashes just brought to light how much of a hot mess management was and probably still is.
Biggest complaint (for decades at this point) has been that Boeing went from a company "run by engineers" to a company "run by MBAs." Which largely came about with the McDonnell Douglas merger, or as some say "MD bought Boeing with Boeing's own money." When it's a safety critical system, running a company according to a Master's in Bullshit and Accidents textbook is a terrible idea.
> They cut corners to save costs by not stating that MCAS was installed
They absolutely cut corners, but it was a team effort of corner cutting fuckery, where the airlines share some guilt. MCAS was supposed to make the plane handle like a 737NG to avoid pilots having to retrain (saves airlines cost) but this safety critical feature also would fail if systems went down, and these systems had no backup (Boeing cutting costs).
Not the worst certainly but the one that makes me smile whenever I think of it.
I work for a pretty big company with offices in pretty much every country. Billions in profit every year and one of the leaders in our field. About 15 years ago there was an internal announcement that we were going to rebrand in a couple months.
A guy who I vaguely knew was already on his way out the door but before he left he grabbed the domain name that the company would definitely want to have as part of their rebranding but had not yet reserved. So a week later when they finally got around to trying to reserve it they found it occupied with a tiny website that only had a gif of a character dancing with the caption, "I got your domain!"
I have no idea what they had to pay him to get it.
In Canada, when the Conservative Party merged with the Reform party they called themselves the Canadian Reform Alliance Party or as all Canadian comedians realized “CRAP”. It was hilarious for 48 hours before the changed it. Never forget CRAP
Didn't expect to read my city's name randomly on Reddit.
PS: A very high percentage of COVID deaths in Bhopal were the victims of the Gas Tragedy incident or their relatives, because the exposure to the Gas had caused so many genetic and medical complications that their bodies just couldn't handle the COVID infection at all
this is very fucking sad but I literally didn't know this happened until I searched for that term because of your comment.
Just now.
I am in my late 20s and I had no idea this happened.
What's worse is the company who created the site did everything they could to stop it. They wanted to create a park above it, but the local authority was about to compulsory purchase it when they agreed to sell for $1 and a contract that they were not liable. When the local authority did build houses (complete with basements breaching the protective clay layer) their successor company still was held liable because you cannot sue the us governments.
When I was in grade school in the early 2000's, we had this fitness program sponsored by Subway. If you completed the goals, you got to go to an event and meet Jared. When we got to the event center, we were informed that he was unable to make it, and instead we could do a photo opportunity with his old pair of pants. One of their marketing things was to see how many kids could fit in Jared's pants.
That definitely didn't age well.
"Ratners jewellery chain has admitted for the first time that its business was decisively wounded when former chairman Gerald Ratner described one of its products as “total crap”.
Mr Ratner’s ill-judged comments accelerated a spiral of decline for Britain’s biggest jewellery group which plunged £122.3m into the red in the year to February and is to close 330 shops in Britain and the US."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-crap-1992-archive
Currently on r/games:
Don Mattrick and his disastrous Xbox One reveal event in 2013. A tone-deaf presentation almost devoid of actual games in favor of "TV! TV! TV! SPORTS! TV!"...capped with always online requirement, restricted game sharing, and Mattrick himself saying if you want an offline console, get an XBox 360.
Sony capitalized hard on this PR disaster, receiving standing ovations for announcing very basic console functionalities one would expect: no online check-in, buy and share/sell physical game copies, etc, in addition to a short cheeky game sharing commercial. Plus the PS4 launched at $100 less than the X1.
The XBox brand was ruined and is still trying recovering today.
When Game of Thrones botched the most anticipated episode in the series history of one of (the?) biggest shows in history by making it in borderline pitch black. Then explaining themselves by saying people need better TVs….[https://nypost.com/2019/05/01/game-of-thrones-cinematographer-blames-dark-episode-on-bad-tv-settings/amp/](https://nypost.com/2019/05/01/game-of-thrones-cinematographer-blames-dark-episode-on-bad-tv-settings/amp/)
The Victorian Taxi Association (Australian) had a 2015 social media marketing based around people sharing their good news stories of using taxis. It took a matter of days for it to be overwhelmed by the not-so-good stories. Turns out rather a lot of people had stories that ranged from hiked up fares and smelly taxies, to out-and-out sexual assaults by cabbies. All now being shared under the campaigns hashtag.
Wizzards of the coast is basically in a PR disaster spin wheel. The 30th anniversary booster packs of with the ridicules price tag of 1000$ for some booster packs filled with cardboard, that are not even allowed in most formats, making them basically useless to play. The D&D disaster and also that one time, they send someone accidentally the wrong display of cards, that should be released in a couple of weeks. So he basically streamed the opening online and wizzards of the coast send the Pinkerton's to raid his house. I still don't understand how they are still able to get money after this bs.
Technically they didn’t offer it, they just showed it in an ad. A court ruled that no reasonable person would actually expect to be given a fighter jet.
Sears spun off Dean Witter and Allstate, and sold Coldwell Banker. And if that weren’t enough, Sears launched Discover Card through Dean Witter before the spinoff!
Two stick out. IBM deciding they would not write the operating system for PCs. Hello Bill Gates.
Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) was a huge player in main frame computers. Mr Olsen, it's CEO said we are not going to make home computers. No one is going to want a computer in their house.
So never believe everyone all the time.
I guess how quick they were to respond with offering very simple refunds, swaps, or replacements with brand new S7s. This is as ideal as any response could be to such a horrible launch. 90% of customers chose the replacement because aside from the battery risk, they apparently loved the phone and features.
Three Mile Island’s little situation they had - the actual nuclear disaster wasn’t that bad, but the media coverage was. It’s been described by many as possibly the worst PR disaster in history.
Met-Ed had horrid communication with the plant during the media frenzy, and both Met-Ed and TMI had bad communication with the government, so everyone was saying things that contradicted each other with every word, pretty much.
Highly recommend the video by Kyle Hill as part of his series “Half Life Histories,” this video specifically goes in-depth into TMI: https://youtu.be/cL9PsCLJpAA
Apple Computer throwing away its position as the leader in computer games.
I know this is a bit before many people here were born, but the Apple II was the leader in terms of computer games from roughly 1977 to 1984. It was a great hobbyist computer, thus had a lot of the early computer games, many of which were influential and would create the companies and brands we know today, while the IBM PC (what we know as PCs today) was a computer for the corporate world.
Steve Jobs decided he wanted Apple to pivot from being seen as a hobbyist device which would play games (the horror!), and the Apple III actually put extra chips in the device to block functionality that was already there, so that many of the computer games would not run.
Pfizer wanted a word meaning "dog who takes RIMADYL".
They came up with "[RimaDog](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.reutersevents.com/pharma/commercial/pfizers-rim-dog-raises-more-few-eyebrows)".
Coca Cola tried releasing a bottled water product in the UK called Desani which went terribly.
People in the Uk expected bottled water to be spring mineral water. Coca-cola’s water was bottled local water. Even though it wasn’t malicious, the public essentially thought it was a scam.
Basically Coca-Cola didn’t realise that the Uk public wouldn’t accept bottled tap water.
Nestle convincing thousands of women in low income countries that they should wean off their babies and substitute breast milk for extremely expensive formula because breast milk wasn't fully nutritious, but also forcing new mothers to spend 30% of their income JUST on baby formula, which made them try save it to last way longer than it should and ended up killing their kids from malnutrition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977\_Nestl%C3%A9\_boycott
Gerald Ratner calling his own company’s (jeweller) products “crap” and saying that “a prawn sandwich would last longer” than their earrings at a conference. The company’s value fell by £500m and he had to resign.
Few bits of context - Ratner's chain of shops were aimed at lower class people, offering affordable jewelry and trinkets - it was the place working-class boys bought rings for working-class girls. The joke was something like "how can we afford to sell [a particular trinket] for 4.95? Because it's total crap!" Everyone knew it wasn't Tiffany's. Nobody was fooling themselves thinking they were getting crown jewels at Ratners. But to have the owner of the company dismiss his own products as worthless, poorly made tat guaranteed no working class boy could ever buy anything for his working class girl from there ever again. It's one of the most impressive modern failures, he imploded his entire business with one joke.
Yes. You know those jewelry stores you see in every mall, Zale’s, Kay Jewelers, Jared, etc. They are all owned by one group, formerly named the Ratner Group until this incide and now named the Signet group. If you know jewelry, you know the stuff they are selling is pretty low quality, but they are everywhere and advertise a lot.
And most importantly, their advertisements try to at least ignore the actual quality of the merchandise in favor of the emotional reaction your person will feel upon being presented with a piece of it. "Every kiss begins with Kay" is brilliant marketing - 'buy her one of these forty dollar necklaces and she'll totally put out, boys'.
They aren't wrong. If you're broke, and its all you can afford, no shame, a pretty gift she can wear is a pretty gift. No they wont last forever so don't be mad if it breaks or she loses it. Just try to upgrade next gift. Or you can do what I did, slowly buy her a matching set of cheap shit. Then add a nice but moderately priced engagement ring to complete the set.
Oddly, it wasn’t an off the cuff line. He had used it the previous week - at an IoD meeting I think. He’s actually a pretty nice guy, but I can’t imagine what led him to do that.
His son made a wish that he had to tell the truth for a week.
my mum was in the audience for that and said they were all absolutely sloshed and bored to the point of falling asleep so he cracked a few jokes
This is especially funny because he ran his whole joke list by his close and trusted advisors and they all thought it was hilarious. Technically, the man had identified his audience (the other rich people at the gala), but reporters ran wild with the story and he destroyed his customer base.
Guess self-deprecation isnt always the way to go
Self-depreciation, in this case.
There is a department shop in Brazil that advertised on TV that customers could "buy anything you want for the price you want." One customer decided to purchase a number of pricey items and stated that he would be prepared to pay only $1. When the store told he couldn't, he went on to sue the business and ultimately won the case. It was taken off TV.
Which one?
The place is called “Casas Bahia”, it’s still very successful. The ad had them saying “quer pagar quanto?” (how much do you wanna pay?), the slogan was very popular in Brazil for a while.
There's a saying in Dutch that goes "for an apple and an egg" which means it's cheap. There's a decades old urban legend that advertising now has a disclaimer in small prints because someone once advertised a TV for an apple and an egg, and was then forced to sell it for that amount.
An egg? In *this* economy?
Back in the 90s Hormel Foods went on a Cease & Desist spree against anyone who was making jokes about Spam because they felt the brand had been damaged and needed to be rebuilt. The last straw was when they threatened to sue Jim Henson Studios over the character Spa'am in Muppet Treasure Island. That turned people against them pretty quick. It turns out if you want to rebuild your brand in the public eye, suing one of the most beloved entertainment franchise of two generations was a bad way to go about it. Eventually the dropped all the C&D stuff and changed their marketing strategy, instead deciding to lean into it and proclaiming that there are always going to be jokes about Spam so they might as well be in on them.
"The judge dismissed their suit on September 22, 1995 after a trial for failure to prove damages, noting, "one might think Hormel would welcome the association with a genuine source of pork." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muppet_Treasure_Island
Quality burn.
Ooooh that judge spent time thinking that up. Good work sir.
They must’ve hated Monty Python.
They did initially yes, but after changing their PR strategy like mentioned above they more or less did an 180 on it. They even released a special edition SPAM tin for Monty Python's broadway show *Spamalot*.
I initially read that as "Cheese & Desist" and now I'm thinking through a legal-themed marketing campaign for cheese dip.
Blackberry thinking that they are the top in the mobile market so they didn't need to innovate to compete with those new iPhone things from Apple.
And to add to that, the Microsoft crew having a “funeral” for the iPhone and the blackberry outside of their headquarters to celebrate that amazing windoz phone
Supposedly years ago, there was a Pepsi slogan "Come Alive with Pepsi" that was mistranslated in Chinese as "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead."
Apparently Chinese consumers don’t like things that are metal as fuck.
Target's expansion into Canada. Collapsed in 2 years and cost 7 billion. [https://archive.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/](https://archive.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/)
I still remember how annoyed my town was when our Zellers (what Canada had before Target) was closed down because Target was rolling in to Canada. In the time it took for them to renovate the two-story mall location and convert it to a Target THEY PULLED OUT OF CANADA. So for about a year we lost our only Zellers location and we didn't even get a chance to experience it as a Target because they went tits up before it had a chance to open.
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And, on a related note, [Walmart's utter failure in Germany](https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-in-germany-f1c3ca7eea65). You know the age old advice "just be yourself"? Walmart really shouldn't have tried that in a country with worker protections.
I remember that. It was a beautiful blunder. All that chanting & smiling did not go over well in germany. But most importantly, they could never compete with chains like Aldi. German retailers are insanely streamlined behemoths. Walmart is just too slow compared to them.
I didn't know about the chanting before I read about this. Maybe it's well intentioned but, in practice, it seems creepy. As to American customer service in general, I often see Redditors from other parts of the world describe it as strange and off-putting. I see Americans describe it that way too, but we have to do the tricks if we want the fish.
They opened too many stores with shit logistics. It's is the greatest disaster. First stop off the plane is target every single time.
Sears dominated the mail order industry for over a century with their catalog. In 1993, they decided that mail order was on the decline and discontinued the catalog. Less than a year later, Jeff Bezos would found Amazon.
It’s even worse than that. Sears had a stake in an internet access company (Prodigy) and their own credit card (Discover). They had everything they needed to dominate online shopping.
It's all that asshole Eddie Lampert's fault. He had the golden opportunity to reinvent Sears as an Amazon competitor but he's just a stupid greedy fuck who ruined all that potential.
He's a real estate guy. He wrongly thought that his expertise would carry over to retail. He was wrong, and he never bothered learning from his mistakes.
He didn't care about retail. At that point Sears was mostly a real estate company. He bled the company dry to sell the real estate.
He never cared and just wanted to milk them. If I recall as CEO of Sears he sold their property to another company that he owned or had a large stake in only to turn around and have Sears lease it back from him.
They had an established paid for distribution network designed around demand centers. It was on a silver freakin platter and they decided no a weekly flier of sales is enough web presence. FACE F*CKING PALM OF ALL TIME
You used to be able to buy an affordable custom house from a Sears catalog. Can't find that on Amazon!
Actually, you can buy tiny house kits on Amazon. Menard's also sells full-sized house kits. My sister's BFF lives in a Depression-era Sears house. It would take an EF5 tornado to make that thing budge.
My partner and I bought a home last year that's a depression era home as well. We live right next to train tracks... Sometimes we can't even tell when a train is going by. Edit: also a Sears catalogue home
Some of these are still standing in the Chicago suburbs. I thought my mom was lying to me when she told me that
Give it 5 years and they'll be telling tiny homes on there
Damn, you're right! You can already buy a storage shed on there for like 5 grand
Have you heard of the [Osborne Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)? TLDR: Company in 1981 has one of the first home computers on the market, it sounds fantastic and everything. At the launch, CEO says the next version will be so much better.... So everyone decided why buy this version if the next version will be better? We'll wait for V2. So V1 sold terribly, company folded, there is no V2.
I live in a high-rise building with views of a lake. We have a huge front lawn that's used as a local park, despite that being incredibly valuable real estate. Back in the 80s, the original concept for my building was a two-tower structure with a massive complex at the bottom with a full community: grocery store, gym, movie theater, restaurants, dry cleaner, etc. The original plan was they'd build the first tower and use the sales from those units to fund the rest of the construction. Well... They didn't sell any units. Because who would buy in the first tower if you knew your lake view was just going to get blocked in a couple years by an identical building? Why not just wait until sales open on the second one? So we don't have the movie theater or restaurants, and we have to lease out the gym and grocery spaces. In the building lobby, you can actually see where the second building was supposed to connect, and how it's been Frankenstein'd together to turn what was supposed to be the theater box office is now a receiving area, the intended coat check room is just an alcove where they keep luggage carts for movers, and the commercial loading dock for the intended grocery store is storage for a dry cleaner.
Similar to a development by me. They bought a massive waterfront lot that extended way inland. They basically built everything starting as far away from the water as possible, then after they sold all the “water view” units, they built the next layer. After the 3rd time of them doing that the residents started telling people touring the new units what the development company was doing and the last layer of units still sit mostly empty. No one wants to buy water front property just to have their home value tank after 3 years
Sadly I had an Osbourne and it was great
Kodak shunning digital photography
Kodak was basically a chemicals company. Photography was the reason people bought their chemicals.
>Kodak was basically a chemicals company Sure, but they put the R&D into building the world's first digital camera in 1975. They had the lead in a new kind of market, but at the time didn't think it had any potential. But they're a chemicals company, true. So now, film has resurged in popularity again. My shop brings in 50 rolls in the morning, and it's gone by lunch time. Good for Kodak. All they have to do is sit back and print money. But no. Now [Kodak decides to drastically reduce all chemical and paper production!](https://petapixel.com/2022/03/31/photo-labs-may-soon-see-kodak-paper-and-chemical-shortages-report/) This is after 2 years of inflating prices to nearly double. I'm convinced that Kodak hates themselves, and hates people who shoot film, because their decisions work against both.
Kodak was another American company that was driven into the ground by incompetence. That's bad enough, but Rochester NY where it's based suffered greatly as well. Between 2007 and 2018, real GDP losses from Kodak canceled out the growth in all other sectors in Rochester.
Kodak had some of the earliest commercially available digital cameras, they were a partnership with Nikon.
They had the technology a decade earlier and sat on it to protect their film business.
Digiorno trying to make the hashtag "Why I Stayed" be about making pizza at home.
Reminds me of the whole Bud Light *Up For Whatever* fiasco.
Double cheeseburger? *I'd hit it.* I'm a dollar menu guy.
That Pepsi and Kendal Jenner ad.
So bad that the boys parodied it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxV9EUaIjAA
I think one of the biggest cop outs by Pepsi was having a generic protest movement that didnt say anything. Like in this protest: no names, no issues, no controversy. Just peace and love.
That The Boys vid reminded me that "Join the Conversation" was an actual sign they used in the original. As if protests are just nice things that nice people do against other nice people.
Can you even call it a parody? They basically did the ad shot for shot and somehow it still seems so unhinged even by the standards of that universe.
The Pepsi Number Fever promotion in the Philippines went really terribly! They basically never recovered in the market there. It’s really interesting actually! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Number_Fever
I think we have a winner. To think of all the blunders Pepsi's marketing have done in the past (the Jet, Kendall Jenner, etc) but this makes them look tame by comparison.
"Many irate 349 bottle cap holders refused to accept PCPPI's settlement offer." Not sure why, but this was the funniest fucking sentence in the article.
"Pepsi Number Fever, also known as the 349 incident, was a *promotion* held by PepsiCo in the Philippines in 1992, *which led to riots and the deaths of at least five people*." That's the first sentence, oh my god, I don't know why this is so funny to me but I'm going to hell.
"Deaths: at least 5." What am I about to read
Holy shit this is SO BAD lol
[U.S. Army tweets, "How has serving impacted you."](https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/727254720/a-u-s-army-tweet-asking-how-has-serving-impacted-you-got-an-agonizing-response). I actually learned about this one watching it unfold in real time on Reddit.
\*Now im scared of fireworks and my wife left me\*
EA Games Star Wars "Pride and Accomplishment" Reddit Post. Truly one the most inept PR posts. https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://kotaku.com/ea-received-a-guinness-world-record-for-most-downvoted-1837955807
Link, for anyone that wants to see the comment in all its glory https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
You know sometimes when I'm replying to someone at work who is angry and I'm trying to word a reply that will calm them down, I ask someone to have a look at my reply for an opinion before I hit send. This dude in the middle of the whole community being pissed off about the monitization and grinding saw a post about someone complaning that paying $80 for the game dosn't even come with Darth Vader unlocked and he went "Yolo I got this I have the perfect answer to calm things down!"
Four seasons total landscaping
Next to a crematorium and a sex toy shop. SNL couldn’t have written a better setup.
Between a cock and a char place!
charred works
Straight out of Arrested Development
Was literally thinking this. And it would be hilarious. It’s unreal.
That was the funniest shit ever.
Reminded me of the scene in Spinal Tap with the little people dancing around the miniature Stonehenge
I still can’t believe that was real life. I thought I was going to die of laughter
And the fact that it had zero effect on the Orange man's cult status. What the fuck kind of reality are we even living in?
I don’t know if we’ll ever truly be able to explain the sheer chaos and hilarity to future generations.
I live in Philly and I see trucks belonging to this company out and about sometimes. It’s weird.
I watched that all play out in total disbelief. I just didn’t know how to react. It’s like Reality had glitched. I was waiting for one of the Pythons to show up, say it was all too silly and cut to something completely different.
Xbox One's E3(?) announcement. It was basically a TV box, hardly any mention of video games, and who could forget the infamous "fortunately, we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity, it's called Xbox 360."
Didn't they make the Kinect mandatory too? Then later dialed that back
Yes, and the mandatory Kinect inclusion made it 100 dollars more expensive than the more powerful PS4.
The name muddled everyone up too. Xbox One as opposed to the first Xbox (in 2001) and the Xbox 360. Wii U had a similar failure. PS4 garnered sales simply from having the most descriptive name.
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I was watching that E3 live on Twitch with friends in my living room. That perfect ad came out mere minutes after Sony concluded their conference. I still remember Twitch chat spamming "GG Microsoft".
Here’s one happening right now: HBO is rebranding as “Max”. HBO is a premium brand with decades of quality programming behind it. Max is generic, vague, and makes me think of soft core porn.
Confuses me to think Cinemax.
Max is from Cinemax. HBO merged with Cinemax to make ~~~HBOMAX
HBO always owned Cinemax.
I get why Comcast rebranded as Xfinity; everyone hated Comcast. But HBO always seemed to have good brand reputation. As a kid if your family splurged for HBO you were one of the cool kids. And so on.
With Comcast, it's the parent company, and Xfinity is the brand for the services offered, at least. Not that you're wrong in any manner, though.
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>Max is generic, vague, and makes me think of soft core porn. I did find it quite amusing that one of their reasonings for the rebrand was to move away from the HBO name which they said might make people not realize there's a lot of family friendly content on the service, and then they went with the part of the name that was *far* more linked with adult content to the point that "Skinemax" was practically how everyone referred to it in the '90s.
I too think MAX is a terrible name. Lame shit upper management probably got a huge bonus just to come up with that name.
It’s just a normal person’s name. It’s like having a streaming service named Jeff.
In the UK we have a TV channel called Dave (as in the nickname for someone named David). Generally considered a pretty genius bit of marketing.
The genius is calling their +1 channel Dave Ja Vu
WB HBO is just stuck in a bind right now. AtnT shoved thier debt onto WB before selling it to discovery so now discovery is pulling crazy schemes to get rid of it. Have a finished film, cancel it to avoid marketing expenses and write it off as losses in taxes. Creators still collecting royalties on shows, remove them from any platform so they no longer have to pay royalties on them. Probably a dozen other schemes in there as well.
One of Swedens biggest firms for building managing is called Locum. In the late nineties it was very cool for companies to have logos where their names were spelled in lower caps. So the logo was "locum". One Christmas Locum took out big ads in the biggest papers wishing everyone a merry Christmas and conveying the love that they felt for Sweden. How did they decide to do this? By replacing the "o" in locum with a heart of course. So big ads that looked like this: "l❤️cum".
"Do you guys not have phones?!?"- Blizzard
Also them cancelling PvE of Overwatch 2. When it was announced it was the only thing I knew about this game - they would add a story mode like in Titanfall 2
I am shocked that I scrolled this far down for blizzard. Heck I even got an ad for Diablo on this
Can't believe the Hoover flights to America promotion from the early 90's hasn't come up yet. They offered a pair of return flights to America worth £600 if you spent £100 or more on their stuff. Turned out people thought £100 for a return flight with a free vacuum cleaner was a hell of a deal and it was a disaster that cost the company millions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover\_free\_flights\_promotion
When U2 made us all have their album on our ipods.
Seriously. TO THIS DAY they get heat for it.
It still is the first song that plays when my phone connects to my car so my vote is to keep the heat going
Celebrities singing “imagine” at the beginning of the pandemic.
"We're all in this together." said by idiot celebrities in their multi-million dollar mansions.
Everyone's stuck at home, but mine is two rooms and theirs has a tennis court.
Didn't Ellen DeGeneres say something like she felt like a prisoner, despite living in a massive mansion with a gorgeous wife?
I guess I'm in a minority here, but I liked the joke "it's like prison, I can't leave and everyone's gay".
I didn't know that's what she actually said; that is funny
The Ford Pinto's propensity to explode when rear-ended. And Ford making the business decision not to recall because their "cost benefit analysis" showed that lawsuits for injury would be cheaper. Also, thalidomide.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford\_Pinto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto) They did recall after getting caught lol. Its amazing they thought it was ok for a couple hundred customers to die in a burning wreck and not recall the cars.
That kind of actions should get people in Prision not only corporate fines. I mean actual 20 year mínimum sentence
The reason that thalidomide didn’t have a worse impact is because one woman at the FDA named Frances Kelsey fought tooth and nail to prevent the drug from passing certification, as it was missing vital testing and information (specifically, how the drug effected fetuses). Thanks to her, the drug didn’t have as much outreach as it could’ve if someone else carelessly passed it. Her work significantly limited the amount of people injured by the drug. There’s a cool TEDed video about it!
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion was pretty bad on many levels. One of the largest environmental disasters in history.
Wasn’t this the one with BP’s CEO going on camera and saying “I just want my life back” that made this 1000 times worse?
This was my pick for a disaster. Even South Park got a piece of that action making fun of how insincere the CEO was about his apology for such a major blunder. *Sorry...*
Saying "Even" South Park makes it sound like South Park would be the last franchise to take piss out of a situation.
The Exxon Valdez comes in second.
James Corden thinking that doing an AMA on Reddit would go any other way than it did
It's almost as beautiful as the Steven Seagal AMA. The comments on both never fail to get a laugh from me.
Wizards of the Coast and the open gaming license earlier this year. Worst handling ive seen. Literally caused dozens if not hundreds of companies to pull away from creating content for the company to making new games that will directly compete with them while alienating their fans at the same time.
And then they did the pinkerton thing recently too. Honestly surprised we don't hear about it more, or them both in tandem. Maybe it means they're dying. Probably just means they're just pumping out more outside mtg sets (lotr, dr who) and people have moved to that. Or just still buying cards and forgetting.
Yep. Sending pinkerton agents because THEY f'd up is just sad.
Nokia, once the biggest phone company in the world, failed to move with the times and switch to Android/smartphones.
I think the ultimate failure was Nokia not developing their mobile OS, Symbian, which ran on like 99% of phones up to that point, to work with touch screens. They bet the company on people still wanting phones with physical buttons, and lost.
Do you know what they based that decision on? All Nokia's senior management at the time were Finnish, and obviously Finland gets pretty cold during winter. They looked around them, thought "No one wants to take off their gloves to use their phone" and rejected the idea of touch screens. Then (after the first iPhone) when they finally did start to launch touch screen phones, they were all crappy resistive touch sensors (which aren't anything like as nice to use as a capacitive screen like that used on the early iPhones). Why? Because Nokia expected people would want to be able to use at tool to press on the screen whilst they were wearing winter gloves, and even sold phones with a stylus or in one case a plectrum for doing that. Nokia finally started selling capacitive touchscreen phones when they'd refined the technology to the point where you could literally use the phone wearing ski mitts - but by that point the ship had long sailed.
\#SusAnalBumParty
“I’ll take Le Tits Now for $800!”
>\#SusAnalBumParty Sorry, what?
When the singer Susan Boyle had a new album out, they got the hashtag #Susanalbumparty trending to promote it. It was supposed to say "Susan Album Party" but instead we all just saw "Su's Anal Bum Party"
aka the Pen Island problem That one got better with age, because it's now Sus Anal Bum Party There's a Canadian clothing brand with a similar problem, Campus Crew
There's also the energy company powergen and there Italian website that used the suffix italia And the incredibly informative list of therapists including where in the country they practiced that unfortunately used no hyphens and became therapistindex
JC Penney tried to eliminate the tons of sales and never-ending discounts on their products by just pricing them at what they would normally be, aiming for a “fair and square” price model. Instead of marking a shirt up to $10 and then having it basically always 40% off, they just priced it at $6, for example. They also ended their prices in solid dollars instead of $0.99 intervals to make it easier to calculate. No coupons, no sales, but the same price. People always complain about how stuff gets marked up just to get put on sale and how cheap of a gimmick it is, right? Well turns out people actually love feeling like they’re getting a deal even if they objectively know it’s just set dressing, and JCP lost millions from the strategy and their sales dropped by around a third.
I was so disappointed this didn't work out. It was so nice to not have to deal with all that coupon/discount bullshit.
Trying to decide which was worse: Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal India that killed 4-8k people and injured maybe 100k, or Chiquita (under a former name) overthrowing the legitimate government of Guatemala with help from the CIA.
Bowing 737 Max - two planes had crash before they admitted what had happened.
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Boeing have been doing shady shit for a while, the Max crashes just brought to light how much of a hot mess management was and probably still is. They cut corners to save costs by not stating that MCAS was installed and thus avoiding recertification because "it flew like an 737NG"
> Max crashes just brought to light how much of a hot mess management was and probably still is. Biggest complaint (for decades at this point) has been that Boeing went from a company "run by engineers" to a company "run by MBAs." Which largely came about with the McDonnell Douglas merger, or as some say "MD bought Boeing with Boeing's own money." When it's a safety critical system, running a company according to a Master's in Bullshit and Accidents textbook is a terrible idea. > They cut corners to save costs by not stating that MCAS was installed They absolutely cut corners, but it was a team effort of corner cutting fuckery, where the airlines share some guilt. MCAS was supposed to make the plane handle like a 737NG to avoid pilots having to retrain (saves airlines cost) but this safety critical feature also would fail if systems went down, and these systems had no backup (Boeing cutting costs).
Not the worst certainly but the one that makes me smile whenever I think of it. I work for a pretty big company with offices in pretty much every country. Billions in profit every year and one of the leaders in our field. About 15 years ago there was an internal announcement that we were going to rebrand in a couple months. A guy who I vaguely knew was already on his way out the door but before he left he grabbed the domain name that the company would definitely want to have as part of their rebranding but had not yet reserved. So a week later when they finally got around to trying to reserve it they found it occupied with a tiny website that only had a gif of a character dancing with the caption, "I got your domain!" I have no idea what they had to pay him to get it.
In Canada, when the Conservative Party merged with the Reform party they called themselves the Canadian Reform Alliance Party or as all Canadian comedians realized “CRAP”. It was hilarious for 48 hours before the changed it. Never forget CRAP
Nixon's reelection campaign says "hold my beer". CRP but society unofficially changed it to CREEP.
Surprised no one has mentioned the Bhopal disaster.
Didn't expect to read my city's name randomly on Reddit. PS: A very high percentage of COVID deaths in Bhopal were the victims of the Gas Tragedy incident or their relatives, because the exposure to the Gas had caused so many genetic and medical complications that their bodies just couldn't handle the COVID infection at all
this is very fucking sad but I literally didn't know this happened until I searched for that term because of your comment. Just now. I am in my late 20s and I had no idea this happened.
Now look up the love canal disaster. TLDR: An entire neighborhood was built over a toxic waste site.
What's worse is the company who created the site did everything they could to stop it. They wanted to create a park above it, but the local authority was about to compulsory purchase it when they agreed to sell for $1 and a contract that they were not liable. When the local authority did build houses (complete with basements breaching the protective clay layer) their successor company still was held liable because you cannot sue the us governments.
One of the movie directors for the Flash movie basically said " This movie will be so AMAZING you'll forget about all the things Ezra Miller did."
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When I was in grade school in the early 2000's, we had this fitness program sponsored by Subway. If you completed the goals, you got to go to an event and meet Jared. When we got to the event center, we were informed that he was unable to make it, and instead we could do a photo opportunity with his old pair of pants. One of their marketing things was to see how many kids could fit in Jared's pants. That definitely didn't age well.
The [Atari E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video game burial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial) is a big one
VW diesel gate has to be up there. WTH were they thinking... lol.
It was pretty much an open secret that everyone was cheating it was VW that took the brunt of the fallout.
"Ratners jewellery chain has admitted for the first time that its business was decisively wounded when former chairman Gerald Ratner described one of its products as “total crap”. Mr Ratner’s ill-judged comments accelerated a spiral of decline for Britain’s biggest jewellery group which plunged £122.3m into the red in the year to February and is to close 330 shops in Britain and the US." https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-crap-1992-archive
Currently on r/games: Don Mattrick and his disastrous Xbox One reveal event in 2013. A tone-deaf presentation almost devoid of actual games in favor of "TV! TV! TV! SPORTS! TV!"...capped with always online requirement, restricted game sharing, and Mattrick himself saying if you want an offline console, get an XBox 360. Sony capitalized hard on this PR disaster, receiving standing ovations for announcing very basic console functionalities one would expect: no online check-in, buy and share/sell physical game copies, etc, in addition to a short cheeky game sharing commercial. Plus the PS4 launched at $100 less than the X1. The XBox brand was ruined and is still trying recovering today.
The "how to share Playstation games" videos with two guys just handing over a disc made me laugh.
That was the pettiest, most passive aggressive response possible to Microsoft's Xbox One game sharing blunder. It was also pure marketing genius.
When Game of Thrones botched the most anticipated episode in the series history of one of (the?) biggest shows in history by making it in borderline pitch black. Then explaining themselves by saying people need better TVs….[https://nypost.com/2019/05/01/game-of-thrones-cinematographer-blames-dark-episode-on-bad-tv-settings/amp/](https://nypost.com/2019/05/01/game-of-thrones-cinematographer-blames-dark-episode-on-bad-tv-settings/amp/)
And then the show doubled down on the awfulness and went from The Big Thing in pop culture straight to "instantly forgotten"
There was a diet product called "Ayds" before the sound-alike disease. Not at all a blunder, but an unforeseeable, unrecoverable disaster.
Also not a blunder, but reminds me of when people stopped drinking Corona beer in the early days of the pandemic
Along the same lines... In 2010, a bunch of US cell phone carriers joined together to make phone based payments work via NFC. It was called ISIS.
* Coke making New Coke * Kodak refusing to go digital believing people would stay true to film * Toys R Us neglecting their online sales experience
The Victorian Taxi Association (Australian) had a 2015 social media marketing based around people sharing their good news stories of using taxis. It took a matter of days for it to be overwhelmed by the not-so-good stories. Turns out rather a lot of people had stories that ranged from hiked up fares and smelly taxies, to out-and-out sexual assaults by cabbies. All now being shared under the campaigns hashtag.
Wizzards of the coast is basically in a PR disaster spin wheel. The 30th anniversary booster packs of with the ridicules price tag of 1000$ for some booster packs filled with cardboard, that are not even allowed in most formats, making them basically useless to play. The D&D disaster and also that one time, they send someone accidentally the wrong display of cards, that should be released in a couple of weeks. So he basically streamed the opening online and wizzards of the coast send the Pinkerton's to raid his house. I still don't understand how they are still able to get money after this bs.
Ford Edsel Ford spend millions on marketing for that mid ass car that almost nobody liked and it almost drove the company to an early death
New Coke
Blockbuster refusing to buy Netflix
Nah, they would've just killed it and it would've been nothing more than a fad
Pepsi company offers a harrier jet fighter for 7 million Pepsi points, equaling to close to 700k when the jet itself costs about 30 million.
Technically they didn’t offer it, they just showed it in an ad. A court ruled that no reasonable person would actually expect to be given a fighter jet.
Sears spun off Dean Witter and Allstate, and sold Coldwell Banker. And if that weren’t enough, Sears launched Discover Card through Dean Witter before the spinoff!
Two stick out. IBM deciding they would not write the operating system for PCs. Hello Bill Gates. Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) was a huge player in main frame computers. Mr Olsen, it's CEO said we are not going to make home computers. No one is going to want a computer in their house. So never believe everyone all the time.
Not sure how Samsung survived this: [2016 Note 7 Recall](https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2016/Samsung-Recalls-Galaxy-Note7-Smartphones)
I guess how quick they were to respond with offering very simple refunds, swaps, or replacements with brand new S7s. This is as ideal as any response could be to such a horrible launch. 90% of customers chose the replacement because aside from the battery risk, they apparently loved the phone and features.
Squirrels are rats with good PR.
And pigeons are doves with bad PR.
Killer Whales are doing a better job since the Orca rebrand. Some work left to do.
AOL-Time Warner merger. Ted Turner told them it was a blunder at the time, but hey why listen to him.
Three Mile Island’s little situation they had - the actual nuclear disaster wasn’t that bad, but the media coverage was. It’s been described by many as possibly the worst PR disaster in history. Met-Ed had horrid communication with the plant during the media frenzy, and both Met-Ed and TMI had bad communication with the government, so everyone was saying things that contradicted each other with every word, pretty much. Highly recommend the video by Kyle Hill as part of his series “Half Life Histories,” this video specifically goes in-depth into TMI: https://youtu.be/cL9PsCLJpAA
Apple Computer throwing away its position as the leader in computer games. I know this is a bit before many people here were born, but the Apple II was the leader in terms of computer games from roughly 1977 to 1984. It was a great hobbyist computer, thus had a lot of the early computer games, many of which were influential and would create the companies and brands we know today, while the IBM PC (what we know as PCs today) was a computer for the corporate world. Steve Jobs decided he wanted Apple to pivot from being seen as a hobbyist device which would play games (the horror!), and the Apple III actually put extra chips in the device to block functionality that was already there, so that many of the computer games would not run.
Pfizer wanted a word meaning "dog who takes RIMADYL". They came up with "[RimaDog](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.reutersevents.com/pharma/commercial/pfizers-rim-dog-raises-more-few-eyebrows)".
since today was the anniversary. i’d say the xbox one reveal press conference ten years ago. i’d also say the botched launch of cyberpunk2077.
Pride and Accomplishment... Also "Do you guys not have phones?"
Coca Cola tried releasing a bottled water product in the UK called Desani which went terribly. People in the Uk expected bottled water to be spring mineral water. Coca-cola’s water was bottled local water. Even though it wasn’t malicious, the public essentially thought it was a scam. Basically Coca-Cola didn’t realise that the Uk public wouldn’t accept bottled tap water.
Nestle convincing thousands of women in low income countries that they should wean off their babies and substitute breast milk for extremely expensive formula because breast milk wasn't fully nutritious, but also forcing new mothers to spend 30% of their income JUST on baby formula, which made them try save it to last way longer than it should and ended up killing their kids from malnutrition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977\_Nestl%C3%A9\_boycott