Marketing Mess ups- Business nightmares with Evan Davis

Marketing Mess ups- Business nightmares with Evan Davis

In this episode of Business nightmares, Evan Davis analysis how businesses have used marketing to try and improve the brand name and increase sales, but have messed up and coursed the opposite. Marketing can make a business ,if done correctly like Big yellow storage company, who made a marketing advert that showed the customers emotions of being flooded with items without storage. They did this by having everyday items move in a wave like motion in a room and this caused a rocketing increase in sales for Big yellow self-storage units. However, marketing mess ups can lead to bad publicity and massive decrease in sales. Evan looks at some business that were and still are huge in the British market, that have made marketing mess ups and had to deal with the consequences. How bad can a minor marketing mess up really effect the image of a business?

Sunny D makes your kids turn yellow!

Sunny D was already a very popular product in American so they decided to lunch the product into the British market. Within the first three months of sales it was Britten's third bestselling drink and in 1999 it had sold over 200 million bottles. They did by this  using clever marketing techniques to make the product seems healthy, but “you can’t hype a poor product” Mark Borkowski Head of Borkowski Agency. They managed to get Sunny D placed in the chilled area alongside all the fresh juices and smoothies and this gave an impression that it was fresh and healthy. They also had a very good marketing advert that showed children rushing into a kitchen and going to the fridge and grabbing the Sunny D after an adult recommending it. This gave the impression that it was a perfect choice for a drink after exercise for children and along with their slogan of “the great stuff kids go for!”, it managed to convince parent that it was the prefect option. It was one of the only drinks at the time that even had the chance of competing for the top drink spot with Coca Cola, however this soon ended when people discovered that it was only 5% juice and had similar amounts of sugar as Coca Cola did. They then did a poorly timed Christmas advert that showed two orange snowmen with Sunny D in their hands. Not long after this a girl from Whales was rushed to hospital after her skin turning yellow and was said to be due to drinking too much Sunny D. In my opinion I feel like this was a very unlucky marketing error for Sunny D as the advert was not intended to have such a negative publicity affect, but on the other hand I feel like they deserved it because the customers health should have been one of their number one priorities. Especially as they tried to hide the fact that the drink is not too healthy by naming the sugars as carbohydrates so the average customer didn’t see it. This lead to sales half in 2001 and Sunny D’s sales are now 4% of what they once were. Sunny D shouldn’t of hyped the product as a healthy option as the product clearly wasn’t. This has showed me that when marketing a product, it important to make sure it’s not false adverting, as this might have good short-term sales impacts, but when the customer discovers the false adverting the long-term impacts are going to majorly damage the business image.

Buying Hoovers products equal free flights to the USA?

Hoovers needed to boost their sales in the 1990’s as they were under a lot of pressure to move large amounts of stock. They had advert idea that showed a hoover picking us two air plane seats and said whenever a customer spends over 100 pounds on their products they would get two free air plane tickets to areas across Europe. I feel like this marketing decision was rushed and businesses should have analysed it before they put it out because if all the customers did use the free tickets then they would have made a massive lost. This also shows what pressure can do on a business and how important it is to not let the pressure impact your decisions. This caused the stock levels to quickly disappear and at one point hoovers had 50% of the market share. With this success hoovers become greedy for more and decided to invest into a new marketing campaign, with a new travel company for flight over to the USA. At first, they were not sure about the offer but then hoover showed them how many people claimed the free Europe tickets and the travel company accepted the offer. The market share was still holding at massive 50% as customer realised it was cheaper to by hoovers than pay for flights. I feel like this I were the marketing promotion become a disaster because the hoovers cost 100 pound and the flight cost 600 pounds and this meant they were making a clear lose and I don’t understand how this got through the marketing team, because even if only a 1 in every 5 people claimed the tickets they would still be making a clear loss of 100 pounds. After a while the customer were becoming unhappy with the fact that they were not receiving their free tickets and this caused negative publicity on Hoovers. This damaged the business image so much the USA owners of hoovers had to step in and sacked the top three bosses in the British sector and invested 20 million pounds into arranging the free flights.  This was a good response from the USA owners as it shows that they have seen the problem and removed the causes of the problem and them addressing the problem will help improve the publicity of the business. However, in my opinion the 20 million pounds was not enough to cover all the flight costs and the damage it has done to the image of the brand. However instead of emitting to the failure and mistakes they have made, they decided to try and trick some of the customers out of the free tickets by making them fly from airports they didn’t want and at dates they didn’t choose to reduce the amount of people claiming them. This was not taken too well by the public and a this caused one unhappy customer to block a hoovers repair van in its home after the service repair called him stupid for thinking he is getting his tickets. This lasted 13 days and blow up on the newspapers and made the image of hoovers even worst. I feel like hoovers has focused on the marketing and promotion side of the business way too much instead of the product side and for a product to be successful, I think that you need an even balance between the two. They have also a horrible customer relationship and this in the long term has just lead to the fall of the business. Only a third of the people that applied for the tickets got them and it cost hoovers 44 million. Hoovers was forced to sell its whole European section off to competition. From this I have learnt to check through any promotion deals thoroughly and make sure that a profit will still be made no matter what happens and that a strong customer relationship is very import.

iPhone with no service?

On June 2010, Apple released the iPhone four and people was camping out for 6 days just to get their hands on the product. The iPhone was half of the businesses revenue back in 2010 so it was important that they didn’t mess up any of the marketing. Personal I have had an iPhone for many years now and I love mine as it’s easy to use and when I get a new phone I can transfer all my detail quickly. I feel like that they been very clever with the product because it will be hard to transfer all my music and contact details across to a new non Apple phone. This forces me to keep buying product from Apple, creating a loyal customer base. After the lunch of the new iPhone there was a basic manufacturing problem that cause the phone to have poor signal and call kept dropping. This made a lot of the customers unhappy so Apple had to respond quickly. This is when Apple decide to shift the blame onto the customers and Sir James Dyson said, “never blame the customer, nothing is ever their fault”. I feel like this is true because if the customer is paying to for the service and product then they should never be at fault as you are selling it to them and a strong customer relationship is key. This quick decision making happen early in the episode with Sunny D, when a company is at risk and under a lot of pressure, they tend to make a lot more mistakes. In the end Steve Jobs owner of Apple call a press conference and said that they were sorry and offer a free case to solve the problem and a 30-day time to get a full refund on the phone. I feel like Apple responded well to the marking mess up and this is why they are one of the business out of the ones mentioned that are still running strong.

In conclusion it shows how a simply marketing error can have a major impact on the image and sales of a business, no matter how big or small the business is. From this I have learnt that marketing mess up tend to start when a business is under a lot of pressure and this causes them to make poor decisions. If I was running business and it can under a lot of pressure I would make sure that I remain care about the situation, but keep it top of my priorities. It would also consider all the decisions that I could make and ask for a lot of opinions on my final decision before lunching it to reduce the risk of marketing mess ups.