As well as the McLibel Trial , McDonald’s has also experienced a number of more conventional marketing problems in recent years. Most of these problems have been new products that have failed to inspire consumers. McLean Deluxe (an attempt to cater for the healthconscious customer) and McSoup are two obvious examples, but it was with the Arch Deluxe burger that McDonald’s experienced its most embarrassing flop.
Marketed
as the ‘Burger with the Grown-up Taste’, the idea was to have a burger
which wasn’t associated with children. Indeed, the advertising campaign
for the Arch Deluxe rammed the message home with various images of kids
shunning the ‘sophisticated’ product.
The trouble was that nobody goes to McDonald’s for sophistication, they go for convenience. Part of this convenience is knowing exactly what to expect. McDonald’s restaurants may serve up gazpacho in Spain and lamb burgers in India, but on the whole they are the same the world over. Most people who walk into a McDonald’s restaurant know what they are going to order before they reach the counter. They don’t want to be bombarded with a million and one variations on what is essentially the same product – a hamburger.
Read full storyAmong many US marketing professors, the story of the Edsel car is considered the classic brand failure of all time. Dubbed ‘the Titanic of automobiles’, the Edsel is certainly one of the biggest branding disasters to afflict the Ford Motor Company.
As with other, more recent brand failures featured in the book (see New Coke, WAP and boo.com for three examples), the Edsel car was launched amid a vast amount of hype. Although the car didn’t appear in showrooms until September 1957, ads promoting it had begun to appear months previously bearing the teaser slogan: ‘The Edsel is Coming’.
Ford
decided though, to fuel public interest, the car itself should not be
seen in the ads, and even when Ford dealers started stocking the car in
their showrooms, they were told they had to keep the vehicles
undercover. If they did not they risked a fine and the loss of their
franchise with the company.
As Ford hoped, interest was fuelled. The company did not think for one moment that the product would not be able to match the hype, and would lead to a consumer backlash. After all, more work and research had gone into the development of this car than almost any previously.
Think of a brand success story, and you may well think of Coca-Cola. Indeed, with nearly 1 billion Coca-Cola drinks sold every single day, it is the world’s most recognized brand.
Yet in 1985 the Coca-Cola Company decided to terminate its most popular soft drink and replace it with a formula it would market as New Coke. To understand why this potentially disastrous decision was made, it is necessary to appreciate what was happening in the soft drinks marketplace. In particular, we must take a closer look at the growing competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola in the years and even decades prior to the launch of New Coke...
According to received branding wisdom, the best way to become a strong brand is to be first in a new category. This theory has been repeatedly emphasized by the world-renowned brand guru Al Ries.
‘Customers
don’t really care about new brands, they care about new categories,’ he
writes in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. ‘By first preempting the
category and then aggressively promoting the category, you create both
a powerful brand and a rapidly escalating market.’
There are indeed a number of cases to support this point. Domino’s was the first company to offer home-delivered pizza and remains the leader in that particular market. Coca-Cola, the world’s most popular and financially successful brand, was the first in the cola category....
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