Brand Blunders – Brands Consigned To The Dustbin
Brand that have been written off and consigned to the dustbins of brand history show just how perceptions play an important part in deciding a company’s future. Change something that a customer likes and without proper change management, even the most ambitious brand building exercise can land a company into trouble.
Brand Blunder – COCA-COLA
On 23 April 1985, keen to defend itself from the upstart Pepsi, the Coca-Cola Company took the radical step of changing its top secret recipe, launching “New Coke” on an unsuspecting world.
Brand like coke cannot mess around
It had done careful research, testing the new taste on 200,000 guinea pigs, most of whom claimed they preferred it. Unfortunately, when the new drink was launched, loyal Coke drinkers hated it – and were furious that the company had messed about with their much-loved favourite drink. Some even likened it to trampling on the stars and stripes.
As Coca-Cola says on its website, it “didn’t set out to create the firestorm of consumer protest that ensued”. Less than three months later, it ditched New Coke, and returned to the re-named “Coca-Cola Classic”.
Outsiders, and Coke customers, saw the controversial recipe change as a massive own goal by a world-beating firm usually seen as invincible. But at an event for staff to mark the 10-year anniversary of the ill-fated relaunch, the then chairman-chief executive Roberto Goizueta described it as an example of “taking intelligent risks”.
Brand blunder – ARTHUR ANDERSEN
Once one of the “Big Five” accountancy firms, with an impeccable reputation, Arthur Andersen’s name became inextricably associated with corporate malfeasance after its accountants were found to have been complicit in the efforts of Texan energy giant Enron to bamboozle investors about its true financial strength.
Not only did its auditors turn a blind eye to Enron’s questionable accounting practices, which allowed it to hide millions of dollars of debt off its balance sheet, but when the company spectacularly collapsed in the biggest corporate bankruptcy in US history, they were caught out shredding crucial documents.
Brand like Arthur Anderson were once key, one action destroyed them
Blue-chip firms left in droves, and by the time Arthur Andersen was found guilty of obstructing justice in June 2002, it had already lost many of its clients, and two-thirds of its huge US workforce, and it was clear that the brand had become irretrievably toxic.
In the UK and a number of other countries, the rump of the firm was bought out by Andersen’s smaller rival Deloitte & Touche later that year – and so the “Big Four” were born. Andersen Consulting, the firm’s management consulting arm, which had broken away in the late 1980s, had taken the apparently prescient step of renaming itself Accenture in January 2001, just months before Enron’s demise.
Brand blunder – ROYAL MAIL
As the millennium celebrations approached, the Royal Mail, lumbered with a stuffy old crown on its logo, decided it could do with a makeover. After an agonising two-year process of racking its brains and hiring consultants to pep up its image, chief executive John Roberts announced in early 2001 that it would take on a completely new identity – “Consignia”.
“The new name describes the full scope of what the Post Office does in a way that the words ‘post’ and ‘office’ cannot,” he told bemused customers.
Brand like Royal Mail almost lost their shirt
Sixteen months later, with its plans to push into overseas markets in tatters, and the meaningless new name a laughing stock, Roberts left, Consignia was consigned to the history books, and Royal Mail bosses hoped the £2m rebranding would be forgotten as soon as possible.
But Keith Wells of the consultancy Dragon Brands, which came up with Consignia, was unrepentant when interviewed by the BBC: “It’s got consign in it. It’s got a link with insignia, so there is this kind of royalty-ish thing in the back of one’s mind. And there’s this lovely dictionary definition of consign which is ‘to entrust to the care of’. That goes right back to sustaining trust, which was very important.”
Brand blunder – SUNNY DELIGHT
With its bright and cheery packaging, lurid orange colour and super-sweet taste, Sunny Delight, launched in the UK in 1998, rapidly started closing in on Coke and Pepsi as the most popular soft drink in the country, with sales worth £160m.
Stocked in the fridge and sold as high in vitamin C, the name “Sunny Delight” had a healthy ring to it. But consumer organisation the Food Commission launched a campaign against it, complaining it was bad for children; and then it emerged that one child in Wales had turned yellow after drinking 1.5 litres of Sunny Delight.
Brand like Sunny Delight almost had it right
Unfortunately, her plight – caused by the additive beta-carotene, which gave the drink its colour – emerged just as Sunny Delight was running an advertising campaign that involved a pair of snowmen turning orange. The popularity of the drink plummeted, and sales had halved by 2003. In 2005, the food giant Procter and Gamble sold the brand to the stand-alone Sunny Delight Beverages Company. By last year, sales were just £6.8m.
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