• From corporate marketing wars that fail to compromising on liquor ingredients and
paying the price, we count 15 times companies have been awful decisions for greed, ignorance
or desperation 15 - Star Wars, (DONT SAY TITLES)
• It was 1977, Star Wars hadn't even released when 20th Century Fox did the dumbest thing
ever - they handed all merchandising rights to George Lucas
• In return all they got was a measly $20,000 dollars, but George became the head of a 3
billion dollar plus company with reach all over the globe, its profits continuing to
grow with each passing day • Fox had absolutely no idea what Star Wars
would become, and for this blunder they missed out on claiming one of the biggest media franchise
trademarks ever 14 - Cosby Show,
• Before The Cosby Show passed into the hands of NBC, becoming a huge hit right from
the first season, ABC passed on their chance to get a slice of the pie
• Cosby made a pitch to ABC for the show, but they wouldn't offer him a commitment without
a script or pilot ready, so he turned to NBC where it catapulted from third on the Nielson
ratings to 1st for 5 more entire seasons • It went on to become the biggest hit of
the 180s and almost single-handedly revived the sitcom genre
13 - E.T, • 1981, the blockbuster hit E.T the Extra
Terrestrial - Steven Spielberg approached Mars the confectionary company to feature
M&Ms as a small plot device in the film • The chief executives at Mars declined
outright and the producers behind E.T were forced to go with their second choice: Hershey
and their Reese's Pieces • When the film was released, Reese's Pieces
were having dire sales but then E.T came along and sales of the candy triples with re-orders
coming in as many as 10 times a day for over two weeks
• Mars, pissed at the missed opportunity, heavily implied they'd never even received
an offer 12 - Kodak,
• We're in the age of rapidly advancing technology with the first digital cameras
only appearing in the early 90s • But 15 years earlier in 1975, Kodak made
the world's first ever digital camera with a patent ready for mass-production - but they
did nothing, and so let their competitors invent it first
• The reason?
They didn't want to destroy the film industry and subsequently end their own company, but
had they produced this revolution for mass market, you might've ended up with a Kodak
brand smartphone • Instead, they went bankrupt in 2012 and
fell into obscurity 11 - Schlitz Beer,
• Back in the 70s, Shlitz was one of the biggest beer manufacturing companies in all
of America only behind Budweiser • Then they made a fatal decision - to cheap
the ingredients in order to produce beer faster, which, for a while, worked quite well
• But then people began to notice that the beer would form floaties in the bottom which
congealed into a thick mucus - and Shiltz didn't recall them, even after realising
• Eventually they had to cave in, but not after 10 million cans had been shipped, crippling
their finances and ending their juggernaut company not even 10 years later
10 - Google, • It was in the 90s that search engines
on the internet were few and far between - you had Yahoo, Excite and Lycos - myself I used
Webcrawler before it got bombarded with ads and paid links when InfoSpace took over
• The original owners of Webcrawler called Excite were actually offered all of Google
for only a million dollars, but Excite declined - to pour further salt into the wound, Google
lowered their offer to $750,000 but still not interested
• Not even 10 years later, Google went public and today they're earning 60 billion dollars
annually • Excite ended up getting merged with Ask.com
in 2004 9 - Oil,
• 1859, back when shovels and picks were the tool of choice to dig up oil - then along
came Edwin Drake and his uncle who invented the first ever oil-drilling apparatus
• When Drake approached some salt-well drillers with his machine, they laughed and called
him crazy • Very soon after, diggers realised how
much of a goldmine it was - they rushed in and became overnight millionaires, although
poor Drake forgot to patent the machine but luckily the state of Pennsylvania and oil
barons paid him to express their gratitude 8 - Telephone,
• Western Union, a big name in the communications industry during the late 1800s with the president
infamously scoffing at the idea of a telephone • For $100,000 he could've bought a patent
that changed the world, but instead he wrote a letter calling the invention an electrical
toy with no commercial possibilities • Two years later, the president of Western
Union realised his giant mistake, so spiteful that he employed Thomas Edison to outdo it
- which never really happened 7 - Microsoft Bob,
• Back before Windows 95, we had Windows 3.1 and this infamous piece of software known
as Microsoft Bob • It was like Clippie from Microsoft Office
but 10x more insulting - it displayed software icons as objects inside a house and was the
software responsible for the text font Comic Sans
• It might've been decent if it hadn't come out the same year as Windows 95, which incorporated
an easy-to-use interface without the silly dumbed-down experience
6 - Apple, • There was a time when the corporate giant
known as Apple worked in a garage, but when they went to Atari to sell their revolutionary
personal computers, they said no • Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak the founders
of Apple even said, hey, it's built from your parts, and you can have the computer just
let us work for you - but still the answer was no
• Apple now has a market value in the 100s of billions of dollars, whereas Atari pretty
much faded into obscurity 5 - Beatles,
• 1962, a time before the Beatles were celebrities - they auditioned at Decca Records in London
and the executive of talent rejected their performance
• He said to his manager, groups are out and four-piece groups with guitars are finished
• Unfortunately for him, over 2 billion Beatles albums sold all over the world in
Beatlemania 4 - New Coke,
• It's hard to imagine that Coke has been around for over a hundred years, and it was
hard to foresee that when the producers of Coca-Cola introduced a new formula under the
brand of New Coke, the backlash would be intense • But that's exactly what happened - despite
New Coke tasting fine, the emotional attachment built over a hundred years from a consistent
brand was too deep, and customers exploded with fury
• Within 3 months, New Coke was gone and Coke Classic returned to enormously high sales
numbers thanks to all that controversy 3 - Blockbuster,
• A more recent one, the year 2000 when video rental stores were booming, Netflix
offered itself to help Blockbuster sell their brand online
• Blockbuster did NOT accept their offer and instead had a terrible 10 years while
internet movies and tv shows became a thing, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2010
• They could've bought Netflix for $50 million and instead, their stubbornness made them
crumble into nothing 2 - M*A*S*H,
• 1972, M*A*S*H became a surprise hit for 20th Century Fox, but then a couple of big
stars dropped out after a few seasons and Fox panicked
• Foreseeing the show wouldn't have long to live, they decided to sell rights for old
seasons to various local TV stations, earning $25 million dollars
• But then 4 years later, a thing Fox thought extremely unlikely happened - the show was
still massively popular, each TV station grossed over a million dollars per aired episode out
of 168 and Fox got nothing 1 - Wal-Mart
• A story about one of the few times when marketing fails and customer support wins
- a war between K-Mart and Wal-Mart in the 1980s
• When both companies decided to duke it out, K-Mart launched an all-out publicity
campaign to raise public awareness of their store and Wal-Mart, without the funds to beat
them, decided to focus on improving stocked shelf efficiency and immediate checkouts
• Wal-Mart obliterated K-Marts sales in the U.S simply from good customer service
and K-Mart had been struggling to keep up ever since