Dear viewers, We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. We've noticed that in certain parts of the video, the subtitles are out of sync, and some embedded titles appear later than intended. Despite extensive editing and multiple reviews, this issue unfortunately slipped through. We understand that this may affect your viewing experience, and we are working to prevent this in the future. Thank you for your understanding, and again, we apologize for the trouble. Kind regards, The Tale Spotlight
Actually as YT has the option of having subtitles, I don't know why videos are adding them to make them mandatory instead of by choice of the viewer. We are not ALL deaf! Another issue is the auto setting of YT's subtitles which we as viewers have to waste time in switching it off! This is what I call a part of 'digital fascism'! Deafness is in a MINORITY! Yes indeed, if those who are hard of hearing or don't want to disturb others, or outright deaf, FINE! I am happy with this OPTION! But an option does not necessarily mean MANDATORY! There IS a difference! WHY is that the highest priority here anyway? I just don't understand the logic.
@@Nino-v7uit’s not that deep. Subtitles by the content creator are more accurate than auto generated subtitles are. Never seen someone so passionately opposed to subtitles.
I’m surprised Bud Lite didn’t make the list. It wasn’t the advertising with Dylan Mulvaney that was their shot in the foot, but the arrogant marketing exec who bragged she would change their “frat boy” customers and drag them into the inclusive 21st century. Well, those fratty customers had made Bud Lite the #1 beer in America. It immediately dropped below all of their grateful competitors. I don’t believe it has, or likely ever will, fully recover.
I didn't agree with you at first because I was looking at it from a perspective of what already happened. But after typing out a couple sentencing I realized you were right. The moment they hired her and she took that approach, Bud Light was likely doomed. Dylan Mulvaney was just the first advertisement she approved and sent to market, but I'm sure there was a whole list of other people and ideas that were going to follow that would have done the same thing to the company.
My favorite blunder was a corporation that announced, to save money janitorial service would no longer be provided, and everybody was supposed to clean up after themselves. The company laid off 14 janitors, two were left, one quit and the last one did what he could. In about a week, the lunchroom was wiped out with overflowing trash cans and garbage, people were stomping around in trash and tracking it all around the plant, the office women refused to come to work because the restrooms were third world, finally somebody called the health department who closed the plant, and it took another week of disinfection and cleanup before the plant could be opened back up again
Thanks for the comment! It seems like the company didn’t realize how important janitors are. Cutting back probably seemed like a cost-saving move, but it clearly led to bigger problems. That’s so bad..
This reminds me of the garbage men in NYC going on strike in the '70s for better wages. Within days there was garbage everywhere, which brought a large number of rats and other animals all over the city. Needless to say, the city relented and increased their wages significantly.
Suggestion for a future video: Make a list of companies who made positive life-changing contributions to humanity. For instance, a Volvo engineer created the 3-point seat belt and then gave the plans to the entire automotive industry to use free of charge.
Philips, the Dutch giant, gave away the compact cassette that soon dominated over record sales in the form of Japanese products. Nowadays a far smaller company!
Ajay Bhatt, and his financial backer, Intel, chose to make USB open source and royalty-free. It lived up to it's name, being a universal serial connection architecture used by 10 billion devices worldwide.
Kodak in the 1940's was offered the patents on the copy machine, but turned it down, hard to understand because the copy machine would have been right up Kodak's proverbial alley. So, the copy machine went on to become the Xerox corporation. But then, about the mid 80's, Xerox made a major blunder. After they invented the basic personal computer, they decided to get out of computers, because they thought there was no market for them. Near the end of the 19th century, Western Union, the famous telegraph company, was offered the telephone but didn't want it, hard to understand because they had all the wires and everything ready to go
You raise an excellent point! Companies often fear risks due to potential failures, but inaction can lead to missed opportunities and setbacks. It’s a tricky balance; sometimes playing it too safe can result in bigger mistakes. Taking calculated risks can drive innovation and growth, making it a true 50/50 situation!
@@295g295 The innovative risk taken by Coca-Cola with New Coke parallels Microsoft’s launch of the Zune in 2006, which aimed to compete with Apple’s iPod. Despite innovations like wireless music sharing, the Zune failed to capture significant market share due to the already dominant iPod. Microsoft was simply a little too late to the market. Despite taken that innovative risk, they failed.
Later Xerox made the same blunder. The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) came up with the first GUI workstation, the first mouse, the first Xerography high speed copier, the first inkjet printer, and a prototype laser printer, and other inventions. Xerox, as the owners of PARC rebranded themselves, went full speed on the copier technology and let the rest languish. So many people got to tour PARC, including Jay Miner (Founder of Amiga), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), and MIT and Cal Tech students (creators of X Windows, Sun Technologies, and future workers at Hewlett Packard).
Only a company like Kodak can make so many mistakes and then blame everyone except themselves! They invented digital photography and let it go. They invented VHS tape and sold it to Fugi. They had a chance to buy Xerox technology for a song, and passed on it, then tried to make their own copier which made copies that faded a few months after they were made. They had a fine compact 35mm camera and dropped it. They came out with the disc camera that was so bad they couldn't give it away! They sold cameras at a loss and made money on the film, then charged more for their film then their competitors. Their hubris was amazing!
It was JVC which 'invented' VHS, and clobbered Sony Betamax by licensing it for free; it made the VCRs cheaper. "They [Kodak] invented digital photography and let it go." Because Kodak was making money hand over fist on film and paper, and thought digital would eat into their massive profits. Well, it certainly did ultimately! The only Kodak film I liked was Panatomic X; very slow at 32 ASA. Their Tri-X Pan @ 400 ISO was rubbish, IMHO. My favourite 35mm B&W films were Ilford Pan X, FP4, or FP5. For colour I used Agfachrome for slides and AgfaColour for prints. MUCH more accurate colour representation than Kodachrome, which showed purple as maroon. (Ektachrome was somewhat better.)
@@rsutherland42 Or Bill Gates who said that "no PC would ever need more than 640K of RAM". My Mac Studio has 32GB of RAM! The point of this is for video processing. When I started working with computers in 1977 they were minicomputers with just 64K of RAM, but they could do AMAZING things because there was NO video processing at all, not even a video console; it was all just pure numeric data. In my case, banking transactions. It was fun to watch the live transactions coming in from branch terminals (NB: there was NO breach of privacy, as we had no idea who the bank account numbers belonged to, and had no way of finding out.)
@@rahb1 JVC made the first VHS players and later recorders, with tape first made by Kodak. Kodak toted VHS as "affordable film" to the movie industry, but nobody wanted it as it would have required new cameras (made by Kodak, natch) and the price of film wasn't the biggest cost in making movies. The first company to make VHS tape in America was the 3M plant in Rochester, NY, the home of Kodak.
Two huge blunders: 1: When Pepsi tried to sell out for dirt cheap to Coke (decades ago) when Pepsi was struggling. Coke laughed and said no. - you are no threat to us. 2: When M&Ms candy turned down an offer from "ET" the movie to use their candies in the film for only a million dollars. They said no and Reese's pieces took the offer. A huge mistake for M&Ms.
4:00 - The McDonald's brothers was according to their beliefs was never intending to expand there business ventures nationwide, even less go international. They had tried state-wise with some places, including Sacramento, but they regarded it as a failure due to the loss of quality. And that is what they where more concerned about = Quality. They wanted there name to be associated with quality products and quality service. SO, when Ray Kroc entered the scene, he had the grand-idea of transforming McDonald's to a giant franchise and with highly disputed and theft-wise motives of methods hijacked McDonald's and made it to what it is today. The point is that the brothers lost the opportunities and lacked the vision for major expansion - But they really never had there hearts into doing so, so did they really commit a blunder?
I don't buy Land Of Lakes because of the removal of the native woman from their packaging. Also I've switched brands of pancake mix and syrup due to the absence of Aunt Jemima.
I don't understand why the took the Indian woman off the Land O Lakes package. As far as I know Aunt Jemima was a real woman who toured the country promoting her products.
I think the three biggest fumblers were Sears, who were "Amazon" at the time, Blockbuster, who became an American culture anchor in record time, and Kodak, who had a near monopoly in film! Ironically, the inventor of the first digital camera was a Kodak employee, and while the thing was a doorstop compared to today, it's amazing that no one thought, "Hmmm, this could turn into something!"
It was the CCD sensor that Kodak invented, not the digital camera, but they bought know-how, lenses, and camera bodies from both Nikon and Canon to produce the first luggable cameras, some still in working order today1
I thought Sears too. They had run their catalog through almost the entire 20th century and had huge brand loyalty. They had the entire distribution network all up and running. The internet and internet commerce was just taking off. All Sears had to do was build a website and put their catalog on it. But they closed and scrapped their entire distribution network. They could have had a ten year head start on Amazon but threw it away. They can't even claim ignorance of the internet. Sears actually owned their own ISP!
I'm guessing it's what happens whenever a bunch of techies make what techies THINK will be great and not listen to people who represent customers. My old man was technical director of a photography equipment company, the Owner was a genius and invented lots of good but hopelessly complicated gear. One of my dad's jobs was to "dumb it down" and remind his boss that the customers aren't engineers.
In the case of McDonald's, the brothers didn't really make a mistake: they basically lacked the skills to develop the business in the way that Ray Croc was able to.
I remember when New Coke came out and tried it one time. It was really bad and I never tried another and was very happy when they brought the old formula back, lol. :)
Not that long ago IHOP made a huge mistake and tried getting in on the burger business, and attempted to change their name at the same time. That didn't last, people were pissed
Back in the early 2000s, I didn't have an internet connection good enough to stream a movie. Most people didn't. So the "streaming will never replace physical media" sentiment from Blockbuster made sense at the time. No-one could have predicted the rapid rise in home broadband that made streaming the juggernaut it is today.
!!!BullSht!!! US Department of Energy, Interior, US Treasury, SEC, FCC and everybody else in the Federal alphabet soup was pushing Bush 1st, 2nd, Clinton, and Regan and Obama on the internet and telecommunications infrastructure improvements and satellite communications/GPS... evvvverybody knew dialup was insufficient because it was not using the FULL BANDWIDTH POTENTIAL of existing copper wires. plus homeowners with just ONE telephone circuit built INTO the home during construction could only do 1 of 2 things. get phonecalls and make them or be on the computer using the internet. frankly, Blockbuster screwed the pooch.
@@jfwfreo That’s not exactly accurate. I worked for AOL in the early 2000s and part of their downfall was that they realized too late that dial up was a dead end. This was after purchasing Compuserve and Netscape for millions instead of expanding their foothold in cable companies they already owned (Lighthouse, Time Warner, RoadRunner). Around 2004 we were letting people that were canceling their service because they had high speed internet keep their AOL for $4.50 a month. Then in 2005 we started a partnership with Covad where we assisted AOL customers conversion to cable, DSL, or other high speed internet while still maintaining their AOL for a paltry $2.50.
I can see why the Macdonald Bros sold out. The $2M is about $25M today. If you had a burger joint and someone offered that much, you'd grab it too. I don't understand why Kroc bought it. MacD brothers didn't have concepts that were patentable. If they had turned him down, for $2M Ray could have just started from scratch and built up the empire. I think he bought it because it was easier and smarter. Selling a burger joint in 1960 for $2M is an unqualified success. 😊
One factor left out of the Coke Rehab after the misstep with Pepsi was the switch to only plastic containers & no more glass bottles, which forever alienated a portion of the market that despised plastic due to health concerns of plastic.
New Coke was NOT a failure! While people were distracted, Coke was changing the original formula from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup, a cheaper option that saved them a lot of money. The original formula is still available in other countries.
I didn’t know that, thanks for the explanation! Interesting to learn that Coca-Cola switched to high fructose corn syrup in the U.S. back in the ’80s instead of cane sugar. That probably explains why the taste can differ between countries. Great info!
Except for one thing, Coke always switched to HFCS before the switch and so did Pepsi. My memorial bottles of Coke bottled in early 1985, old Coke formula, already had the HFCS in it.
McDonald's wasn't a sales blunder. They didn't have the ability to expand but Kroc did. If they didn't sell they probably would've closed due to competition. Selling was their best option considering the other option of losing everything.
good idea, because although there are slight taste differences between sucrose and fructose, they are basically the same product. So once you're used to one, the other one tastes funny. Whenever I buy the cokes from Mexico with cane sugar, they taste weird to me.
As a Canadian, your comments about Target are accurate. The stores didn't offer anything that other department stores didn't already have and the prices were, at best, the same if not higher. Many of the specials and the items exclusive to Target USA did not come to Canada. In short Target was just another mid-priced department store. They also bought out many Zellers stores, as the footage in your video shows, and while Zellers had been failing, it was a Canadian chain that Canadians liked. So Target had to go that extra step to overcome those feelings but they didn't. And when they left they added insult to injury by laying off thousands of staff but the CEO for Target Canada got a bonus. WTF? One important business blunder that you didn't mention was Sears not getting into on-line shopping. Sears had so much experience in catalogue orders with warehouses and the processing of orders. There weren't many companies with the background and expertise that were already in place to switch to on-line shopping. But for some reason Sears did not move fast enough into that style of shopping. We see where that got Sears.
Near the end, Sears started selling tires on Amazon that you could pick up at their stores. Had they done that 10-15 years earlier, they could at least have saved their Craftsman and Die Hard brands, which they ended up selling.
Ten cent beer night. Cleveland Indians offered beer for only 10 cents. There was a limit of 6 beers per purchase but no limits on the number of purchases a person could make. It did not go well
In 2012, Bic Pens, the largest and most successful sellers of ballpoint pens (over 100,000,000,000 sold), decided to issue pens with pink and purple ink "for women". It failed immediately and lost them millions.
The pink and purple pens were not a failure, per se. The colours were considered not legal for signatures on contracts, some questioning even use on credit card slips. Back then copiers could not read anything but dark colours like Blue or Black. Not anymore but idea too soon.
A couple of other examples come to mind. One is that the successful car company Datsun decided to rebrand itself as Nissan. The rebranding created some confusion among consumers here is the USA. A second example is that of IBM vs. the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, National Cash Register, Control Data, and Hewlett-Packard) and Xerox. They all attempted to compete with IBM in the mainstream market with IBM but were relegated to supplying non-mainframe computers and components in other spaces.
A big common factor in a lot of these is lack of faith. That won't sell, that's not going to last, people aren't going to like that! So they ALL stand in that line of other people who had no faith.
Kodak not getting what digital photography would do to their film business is surely the worst. and ALL phone companies NOT jumping onboard with cellular right away was a close second.... - just FIND an actual pay phone today...............
1:55 - I burst out laughing when Blockbuster went belly up. I rented a video, & there was a severe blizzard the day I needed to return it, couldn't even get out of the house. Put it in the return slot the next day with an explanatory note. A few months later, I tried to rent another video. The clerk said "You have to pay your fine before I rent you these." & her voice was dripping with snark. Wanted to tell her what she could do with the video, but wanted to see the movie, so sucked it up and paid both the fine & the rental fee. Wanted to kick myself. Movie turned out to not be so great. I don't even remember which one it was. Hope she enjoyed that moment, cuz she obviously wound up losing her job. Good! Karma's a B*tch, ain't it? ROFLMAO
@@rustyshackleford3320 I don't remember, but it would have been ironic had it been "Donner Pass: The Road to Survival" or "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." Definitely wasn't the latter. Never was into John Candy's brand of humor, may he rest in peace 🙏
@@SmartJanitor Had I been present when that spiteful clerk's job fell into the abyss, you betcha. Holding my sides, tears running down my cheeks, & hyperventilating with laughter. No apologies, no regrets, just a belief in Justice.
From Vermont (Mont Ver) is Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. Originally it had been marketed as a natural organic environmental 'green' product with the theme of a small homemade product. Now B & J has become vastly commercialised, corporate, and today is not standing up to its original standard. It is the ole familiar corporate greed of cutting back - insidiously - cheating the quality it has once stood for.
The engineers at Kodak invented the digital camera and the management threw it away. Xerox engineers invented the Graphical User Interface used in Windows, iPhones and Android, and the management didn't see any use for it. A lot of publishers turned down J. K.Rawlings' Harry Potter books. And the worst was Gary Kildall who didn't sign the agreement for the IBM PC's operating system. Bill gates stepped in and Microsoft is a house hold name.
Even worse for Gary Kildall, Bill Gates turned down IBM the first time because he didn't have an operating system to give them. When he got wind that Gary Kildall didn't sign IBM's agreement, Gates got a lead on a company that had an operation system for the 16 bits computers and when IBM came back, Gates signed that agreement with the codicil that IBM completely owns the hardware and he pay royalties ONLY on the operation system he sells them, leaving Microsoft to create their own operation system. So, at the end, when PC compatibles came out, Microsoft was selling PC-DOS (the one with the IBM roayalty) and MS-DOS (the one without the royalty).
Texaco purchased Getty Oil in 1984 and immediately sold off one of Getty's subsidiaries - ESPN. That was before cable television became so popular. Texaco's narrow vision and resistance to diversify is probably the main reason they are no longer in business today.
With regards to Target, it wasn't only not understanding the Canadian market, it was also about not understanding geography. All Target had to do was look at map of the border separating Canada and the United States. Most, not all, of the major cities in Canada are located about a one hour drive from the U.S. border. When Target consumer expectations were not being met in Canada all the Canadian consumers had to do was to hop in their cars and drive south, which is exactly what they did. Ironically Target ended up being in competition with themselves.
Coca-Cola did the one thing that customers hate when there are only two competitors, imitate the competitor completely. If customer wanted the competitor, they would've switched and bought from them. When they realized that, the comeback of Classic Coke salvaged the disaster.
On the positive side, it got people talking about Coca-Cola and put it in the news more than any ad could. I doubt that was the strategy but in retrospect it did work out.
The Time Warner merger with AOL should be in the running for one of the biggest failures. Basically criminal how much money was involved to merge these oil & water media moguls!
Yeah, such a horrible business decision of those McDonald's guys for selling a business they couldn't expand for 10 million dollars a piece adjusted to today's dollars.
Ray Kroc could have created the McDonalds concept with any one of thousands of hamburger stands. The fact that the McDonalds brother did not share that vision is not a mistake on their part. They did OK for themselves in the end.
Ok, Blackberry didn't "ignore" the touchscreen era. They rushed the 9530 (Storm) to market, knowing it was faulty, and around the same time they had the major BIS outage that took all of the devices down in multiple continents. It was already downhill, they just started several steps behind consumer sentiment and couldn't recover for a number of reasons. Fact remains, they were far better secured, but non-enterprise consumer desires overweighed service capability.
you left off Woolworth and Kresge 5/10. Kresge started K-Mart, but Woolworths management contented Americans would not drive to suburban shopping centers with free parking but preferred to shop downtown. by the time Woolworth started Woolco it was too late. Then K-Mart refused to build in small rural towns and then Walmart came along a dominated the market and soon even took over the cities leaving K-Mart out.
14:24 - At about this time, I discovered private label / store brand 'premium' orange juice that matched the flavor of Tropicana Pure Premium juice. Also, at about this time, the express train of all Tropicana refers on CSX railroad from Sarasota, FL, to Kearny, NJ, was replaced by a mixed express train on CSX.
I want to know why Coke changed "Coke Zero" to "Coke No Sugar." There was nothing wrong with the old recipe. I found plenty of Facebook groups asking to change it back, but Coke ain't listening to them. Also, Arnott's biscuits changed their BBQ Shapes to some God awful flavour and there was a major backlash. So they brought back the original flavour and labelled it as Original. Thank God for that. I don't know how much they lost.
You should look at the "Masters Hardware" attempt by Woolworths in Australia, (no connection with either the US named business or the South African business, which for some reason use the same name but have no publicly known links). They tried a concept competing with "Bunnings" a BIG one stop for anything you might need, hardware chain. They partnered up with Lowes, (SP?) an American hardware provider, which due to poor performance cut ties. In the end they shut down the entire business, sustaining losses exceeding over a BILLION dollars. Woollies are grocers, where they do well, a good lesson in "stick to your knitting".
Budwiser decided to make a commercial with a transgender in a bathtub playing with bubbles and drinking Budwiser. It's one of the greatest marketing blunders in history according to some outlets. I thought for sure it'd be on here,
Well, I bet you the marketing team behind that commercial weren't trying to be racist when they did it. They probably didn't even realize people would understand it that way. Cancel culture hit them hard
@ As I say regarding similar situations, there are 2 possibilities: disgustingly racist or spectacularly stupid. ;-) P.S. Did you ever see the black & white-striped shirt that had a yellow star on it? I believe it was from 2016 or so. Another magical marketing moment for the ages…
Want to echo classic brands that have fallen to pandering to the Woke religion. 1st Bud Light 2nd Jaguar I'm pretty sure that Budwieser is still feeling the effect of Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. The sillines of the Jaguar commercial, which did not even have a car it, convinced me to never think of buying this once proud and respected vehicle! TATA must be wondering who the heck approved this mess!
Decca Signed the Rolling Stones, the Who and David Bowie after they had Rejected The Beatles ya know. They had learned their lessons so did not Reject the Stones and the rest.
Target’s computers couldn’t handle converting from US dollars to Canadian. Also, they didn’t take into consideration the VAT, the onerous sales tax that drives Canadians over the border to shop. They should have just opened more stores by the Canadian border. There are stores in Buffalo, for instance, in industrial areas that are there to cater almost exclusively to Canadians.
It'd be interesting to know just how many loyal customers Coke lost to Pepsi over their ridiculous garbage "new" Coke. It was five in my family. We were Coke die hard. We switched to Pepsi and never went back. It's too bad that greed cost them, but oh well. Maybe, hopefully they learned their lesson.
Bayer purchasing Monsanto even when Monsanto faced lawsuits for Round Up. The acquisition cost BAYER Billions of dollars in legal fees and lawsuit payments.
Those corporate executives up in the ivory tower, typically have little sense. Whenever some new idea comes along, they never say, let's carefully try this out and see if it will work. Nope, they second the motion and jump in whole hog and create the most disasterous blunders, such as downsizing. They never eat crow and go back. They leave for a new job and let the people behind, still at the company, deal with the fallout. Often, the company goes out of business
I share some of your skepticism about highly-credentialed well-educated corporate-ladder-climbing executives who aren't necessarily thoughtful about the risks involved with major business initiatives.
Companies do not "blunder," people do. And people run corporations. Any new executives will always say that they will "cut costs and increase revenue." The easiest way to do this is to cut R&D and quality control, outsource technical staff to the cheapest overseas firm, increase advertising, and basically "jump the shark." At the end of the year, they give themselves big bonuses. Then they decide to take risky endeavors, like trying to enter a new unrelated market, gamble the coffers on derivitives, etc. When the company takes a nose dive, they them sell all assets (IP, computers, buildings, desks, staplers), fire everyone else, and again give themselves big bonuses, before moving on to the next company. Every one of these happened to at least one of the companies that I worked with in the past. So, no, not blunders. Greedy narcissistic sociopaths get more bonus money than those that maintain a healthy sustained business. It's all about THIS QUARTER baby.
Now if Disney would learn from their blunders they will head in the direction of Coke. But if they keep it up they will head in the direction of Blockbuster.
How about Sears. They were Amazon before Amazon was. The infrastructure was there, if they'd only had the foresight to enter the Internet age instead of getting rid of catalog sales.
Exactly, it’s crazy how one decision by IBM allowed Microsoft to become such a giant. If they had bought them back then, the tech world would look completely different today!
How about making a video on the companies that went woke for some real blunders, like Budweiser, Disney Land, Target, Coca-Cola, and so on? That would make a great video for these times.
Coca Cola's New Coke was not a blunder. It's failure was likely designed. The re-introduction of Classic Coke allowed them to replace sugar with high fructose corn syrup, which nobody seemed to notice, because the product had been unavailable for a time. Ultimately, the cheaper replacement has netted Coke much greater profits, making the loss on New Coke a non-factor. It has also created a product much more unhealthy for its users, a boon for Coke, a health plague for the public, contributing to obesity and diabetes, among other problems. The effect of high fructose corn syrup is much worse than sugar, although the industry will dispute this because of the increased profits inherent in its use.
This video contains some great examples but there are many more such as Bud Light, Kodak passing on digital camera technology, and IBM passing on Apple computers.
Blockbuster at the time when Netflix wanted them to buy them out was at the height of their rent business and didn't need to buy Netflix. Almost any company would had done the same if they were in the same position. Knowing the future is an impossible thing to know.
Of course, because American public businesses only think about the next quarter and never think about the future. If Blockbuster was privately owned they might have gone for it, given that mailing CDs was way more convenient than going to a store. Streaming wasn't a thing then and it didn't have to be for Blockbuster to have benefitted.
You forgot Bud Light and the Edsel. Kodak invented the digital camera but never did anything with it. Xerox invented the mouse and graphic user interface (Windows & Apple) but never did anything with it.
I never liked pepsi cola. I found many alternatives to Coca Cola- RC Cola was always one even before "new Coke" in the 1980's. When Coke changed I found-out that some store brands of cola were just as good and were about half the price. They are very lucky they survived. I don't know if many people have noticed the lack of store brand colas in the supermarkets since then but I'm sure it cost Coca Cola Company a lot of money to get them out of the stores and to keep them out.
Sears was a major Blunder, they could have been the next Amazon. They had the infrastructure and everything, but they wanted to stick with stores and catalogs and they failed.
My company at the time ( ncr ) bought a company that dispensed dvd. You'll remember it as Blockbuster Express machines. Worst machines ever. Redbox machines were much simpler to work on. I hated those calls. It was obvious by the time those machines hit the streets, streaming just around the corner. So, ncr spent millions $$$$ on a dying business ....
To be fair, the McDonald's brothers was more about getting screwed over than it was a blunder. And in 1961 they were each bought out for $1million after taxes.... There is no scenario where they would have ever had that net worth if they just kept running one hamburger location. They definitely got screwed over but I wouldn't call it a blunder.
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Actually as YT has the option of having subtitles, I don't know why videos are adding them to make them mandatory instead of by choice of the viewer. We are not ALL deaf! Another issue is the auto setting of YT's subtitles which we as viewers have to waste time in switching it off! This is what I call a part of 'digital fascism'!
Deafness is in a MINORITY! Yes indeed, if those who are hard of hearing or don't want to disturb others, or outright deaf, FINE! I am happy with this OPTION! But an option does not necessarily mean MANDATORY! There IS a difference! WHY is that the highest priority here anyway? I just don't understand the logic.
@@Nino-v7uit’s not that deep. Subtitles by the content creator are more accurate than auto generated subtitles are. Never seen someone so passionately opposed to subtitles.
You would do better to have a human being narrate instead of a robot.
AI is still coming into its own. Don’t blame yourselves.
If this video was released one month later, Jaguar would be here toooo
What happened with Jaguar?
You're not kidding! The backlash is deservedly glorious though....
@@TheTonyahawk....a new woke weird commercial....I'm a lifelong Jag lover and owner...I'm in shock
@@lanceprzybyla7662 Thank you for the info I'll have to see this
I’m surprised Bud Lite didn’t make the list. It wasn’t the advertising with Dylan Mulvaney that was their shot in the foot, but the arrogant marketing exec who bragged she would change their “frat boy” customers and drag them into the inclusive 21st century. Well, those fratty customers had made Bud Lite the #1 beer in America. It immediately dropped below all of their grateful competitors. I don’t believe it has, or likely ever will, fully recover.
I will never buy it again.
I didn't agree with you at first because I was looking at it from a perspective of what already happened. But after typing out a couple sentencing I realized you were right. The moment they hired her and she took that approach, Bud Light was likely doomed. Dylan Mulvaney was just the first advertisement she approved and sent to market, but I'm sure there was a whole list of other people and ideas that were going to follow that would have done the same thing to the company.
My favorite blunder was a corporation that announced, to save money janitorial service would no longer be provided, and everybody was supposed to clean up after themselves. The company laid off 14 janitors, two were left, one quit and the last one did what he could. In about a week, the lunchroom was wiped out with overflowing trash cans and garbage, people were stomping around in trash and tracking it all around the plant, the office women refused to come to work because the restrooms were third world, finally somebody called the health department who closed the plant, and it took another week of disinfection and cleanup before the plant could be opened back up again
Thanks for the comment! It seems like the company didn’t realize how important janitors are. Cutting back probably seemed like a cost-saving move, but it clearly led to bigger problems. That’s so bad..
"But think of the money we'll save!" SMH.
Most people thinking they’re “above” janitors… they won’t even offer to do the job to save the company millions.
No one uses that phrase janitor that much now days.Its called maintenance department 😮
This reminds me of the garbage men in NYC going on strike in the '70s for better wages. Within days there was garbage everywhere, which brought a large number of rats and other animals all over the city. Needless to say, the city relented and increased their wages significantly.
Suggestion for a future video: Make a list of companies who made positive life-changing contributions to humanity. For instance, a Volvo engineer created the 3-point seat belt and then gave the plans to the entire automotive industry to use free of charge.
Philips, the Dutch giant, gave away the compact cassette that soon dominated over record sales in the form of Japanese products. Nowadays a far smaller company!
Ajay Bhatt, and his financial backer, Intel, chose to make USB open source and royalty-free. It lived up to it's name, being a universal serial connection architecture used by 10 billion devices worldwide.
Kodak in the 1940's was offered the patents on the copy machine, but turned it down, hard to understand because the copy machine would have been right up Kodak's proverbial alley. So, the copy machine went on to become the Xerox corporation. But then, about the mid 80's, Xerox made a major blunder. After they invented the basic personal computer, they decided to get out of computers, because they thought there was no market for them. Near the end of the 19th century, Western Union, the famous telegraph company, was offered the telephone but didn't want it, hard to understand because they had all the wires and everything ready to go
You raise an excellent point! Companies often fear risks due to potential failures, but inaction can lead to missed opportunities and setbacks. It’s a tricky balance; sometimes playing it too safe can result in bigger mistakes. Taking calculated risks can drive innovation and growth, making it a true 50/50 situation!
I'd like to see some other examples of a company that *did* take *that innovative risk*, and the rusult was a major failure.
@@295g295 The innovative risk taken by Coca-Cola with New Coke parallels Microsoft’s launch of the Zune in 2006, which aimed to compete with Apple’s iPod. Despite innovations like wireless music sharing, the Zune failed to capture significant market share due to the already dominant iPod. Microsoft was simply a little too late to the market. Despite taken that innovative risk, they failed.
@@295g295
Edsel.
Later Xerox made the same blunder. The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) came up with the first GUI workstation, the first mouse, the first Xerography high speed copier, the first inkjet printer, and a prototype laser printer, and other inventions. Xerox, as the owners of PARC rebranded themselves, went full speed on the copier technology and let the rest languish. So many people got to tour PARC, including Jay Miner (Founder of Amiga), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), and MIT and Cal Tech students (creators of X Windows, Sun Technologies, and future workers at Hewlett Packard).
Don't forget Circuit City - they stopped paying commissions to their sales reps to cut costs, and all the top sales reps left and got another job.
Facebook is the worst, I wish it had failed.
Only a company like Kodak can make so many mistakes and then blame everyone except themselves! They invented digital photography and let it go. They invented VHS tape and sold it to Fugi. They had a chance to buy Xerox technology for a song, and passed on it, then tried to make their own copier which made copies that faded a few months after they were made. They had a fine compact 35mm camera and dropped it. They came out with the disc camera that was so bad they couldn't give it away! They sold cameras at a loss and made money on the film, then charged more for their film then their competitors. Their hubris was amazing!
To match this is the analysis of IBM in the 1940's that the total world market for computers was 5!
It was JVC which 'invented' VHS, and clobbered Sony Betamax by licensing it for free; it made the VCRs cheaper. "They [Kodak] invented digital photography and let it go." Because Kodak was making money hand over fist on film and paper, and thought digital would eat into their massive profits. Well, it certainly did ultimately! The only Kodak film I liked was Panatomic X; very slow at 32 ASA. Their Tri-X Pan @ 400 ISO was rubbish, IMHO. My favourite 35mm B&W films were Ilford Pan X, FP4, or FP5. For colour I used Agfachrome for slides and AgfaColour for prints. MUCH more accurate colour representation than Kodachrome, which showed purple as maroon. (Ektachrome was somewhat better.)
@@rsutherland42 Or Bill Gates who said that "no PC would ever need more than 640K of RAM". My Mac Studio has 32GB of RAM! The point of this is for video processing. When I started working with computers in 1977 they were minicomputers with just 64K of RAM, but they could do AMAZING things because there was NO video processing at all, not even a video console; it was all just pure numeric data. In my case, banking transactions. It was fun to watch the live transactions coming in from branch terminals (NB: there was NO breach of privacy, as we had no idea who the bank account numbers belonged to, and had no way of finding out.)
@@rahb1 JVC made the first VHS players and later recorders, with tape first made by Kodak. Kodak toted VHS as "affordable film" to the movie industry, but nobody wanted it as it would have required new cameras (made by Kodak, natch) and the price of film wasn't the biggest cost in making movies. The first company to make VHS tape in America was the 3M plant in Rochester, NY, the home of Kodak.
@@rahb1 That brings back distant memories.Ilford FP4 !and Pan X.
The Decca story is outright funny. A perfect example that "experts" are rarely actually experts. (This applies to Hollywood too. And others.)
The Tropicana new packaging looked like cheep store brand rubbish.
Yeah, have to wonder what the marketing people were thinking. Orange with a straw in it. Why walk away from that?
Two huge blunders: 1: When Pepsi tried to sell out for dirt cheap to Coke (decades ago) when Pepsi was struggling. Coke laughed and said no. - you are no threat to us. 2: When M&Ms candy turned down an offer from "ET" the movie to use their candies in the film for only a million dollars. They said no and Reese's pieces took the offer. A huge mistake for M&Ms.
4:00 - The McDonald's brothers was according to their beliefs was never intending to expand there business ventures nationwide, even less go international.
They had tried state-wise with some places, including Sacramento, but they regarded it as a failure due to the loss of quality. And that is what they where more concerned about = Quality.
They wanted there name to be associated with quality products and quality service. SO, when Ray Kroc entered the scene, he had the grand-idea of transforming McDonald's to a giant franchise and with highly disputed and theft-wise motives of methods hijacked McDonald's and made it to what it is today.
The point is that the brothers lost the opportunities and lacked the vision for major expansion - But they really never had there hearts into doing so, so did they really commit a blunder?
Where is Atari turning down the Nintendo Entertainment System to be sold as an Atari and built under license in the United States?
I don't buy Land Of Lakes because of the removal of the native woman from their packaging. Also I've switched brands of pancake mix and syrup due to the absence of Aunt Jemima.
I agree and did the same
I don't understand why the took the Indian woman off the Land O Lakes package. As far as I know Aunt Jemima was a real woman who toured the country promoting her products.
I think the three biggest fumblers were Sears, who were "Amazon" at the time, Blockbuster, who became an American culture anchor in record time, and Kodak, who had a near monopoly in film! Ironically, the inventor of the first digital camera was a Kodak employee, and while the thing was a doorstop compared to today, it's amazing that no one thought, "Hmmm, this could turn into something!"
It was the CCD sensor that Kodak invented, not the digital camera, but they bought know-how, lenses, and camera bodies from both Nikon and Canon to produce the first luggable cameras, some still in working order today1
I thought Sears too. They had run their catalog through almost the entire 20th century and had huge brand loyalty. They had the entire distribution network all up and running. The internet and internet commerce was just taking off. All Sears had to do was build a website and put their catalog on it. But they closed and scrapped their entire distribution network. They could have had a ten year head start on Amazon but threw it away.
They can't even claim ignorance of the internet. Sears actually owned their own ISP!
google plus they had the audience they had the technology to make a better app...how in the hell they screwed that up
I and a bunch of our friends flcoked to Google +. We called it "facebook for the smart crowd." Too bad they killed it.
I'm guessing it's what happens whenever a bunch of techies make what techies THINK will be great and not listen to people who represent customers.
My old man was technical director of a photography equipment company, the Owner was a genius and invented lots of good but hopelessly complicated gear. One of my dad's jobs was to "dumb it down" and remind his boss that the customers aren't engineers.
In the case of McDonald's, the brothers didn't really make a mistake: they basically lacked the skills to develop the business in the way that Ray Croc was able to.
I remember when New Coke came out and tried it one time. It was really bad and I never tried another and was very happy when they brought the old formula back, lol. :)
An additional blunder: Ford Motor Company's introduction of the Edsel in 1957. Its issues included style, technical, and manufacturing.
That's how Ford killed off anything "new" in the 1950s, by jamming it into one model of car and not testing it well.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
Not that long ago IHOP made a huge mistake and tried getting in on the burger business, and attempted to change their name at the same time. That didn't last, people were pissed
I've read about it! Confusion happend because of the name IHOb. Pancakes are better anyway 🥞
That was part of the promo. Not a blunder.
I don't know if it's chainwide; but our IHOP used to have at least six syrup options at the table; now it has only two. For a pancake house?
In Sweden, many McDonald shops have been taken over by Brothers and then filed for bankruptcy.
@@geraldmartin7703..... boysenberry....yum....I liked the variety too
Back in the early 2000s, I didn't have an internet connection good enough to stream a movie. Most people didn't. So the "streaming will never replace physical media" sentiment from Blockbuster made sense at the time. No-one could have predicted the rapid rise in home broadband that made streaming the juggernaut it is today.
Yes, they could have
@@DERRTYCHYBO Definitely. As a CS prof at the time, high speed internet was already being worked on and predicted.
!!!BullSht!!! US Department of Energy, Interior, US Treasury, SEC, FCC and everybody else in the Federal alphabet soup was pushing Bush 1st, 2nd, Clinton, and Regan and Obama on the internet and telecommunications infrastructure improvements and satellite communications/GPS... evvvverybody knew dialup was insufficient because it was not using the FULL BANDWIDTH POTENTIAL of existing copper wires. plus homeowners with just ONE telephone circuit built INTO the home during construction could only do 1 of 2 things. get phonecalls and make them or be on the computer using the internet.
frankly, Blockbuster screwed the pooch.
@@jfwfreo That’s not exactly accurate. I worked for AOL in the early 2000s and part of their downfall was that they realized too late that dial up was a dead end. This was after purchasing Compuserve and Netscape for millions instead of expanding their foothold in cable companies they already owned (Lighthouse, Time Warner, RoadRunner). Around 2004 we were letting people that were canceling their service because they had high speed internet keep their AOL for $4.50 a month. Then in 2005 we started a partnership with Covad where we assisted AOL customers conversion to cable, DSL, or other high speed internet while still maintaining their AOL for a paltry $2.50.
That was simply a lack of forward thinking. People tend to be so archaic in their ways sometimes.
I won't give it away, but for the next follow-on to this well done video, look at the infamous Hoover vacuum cleaner blunder in the UK!
I can see why the Macdonald Bros sold out. The $2M is about $25M today. If you had a burger joint and someone offered that much, you'd grab it too.
I don't understand why Kroc bought it. MacD brothers didn't have concepts that were patentable. If they had turned him down, for $2M Ray could have just started from scratch and built up the empire. I think he bought it because it was easier and smarter.
Selling a burger joint in 1960 for $2M is an unqualified success. 😊
All of the publishers that rejected J K Rowling before one of them finally accepted her first Harry Potter book.
Add to these, Thomas Edison rejecting Nikola Tesla's alternating current system, which George Westinghouse implemented.
One factor left out of the Coke Rehab after the misstep with Pepsi was the switch to only plastic containers & no more glass bottles, which forever alienated a portion of the market that despised plastic due to health concerns of plastic.
New Coke was NOT a failure! While people were distracted, Coke was changing the original formula from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup, a cheaper option that saved them a lot of money. The original formula is still available in other countries.
I didn’t know that, thanks for the explanation! Interesting to learn that Coca-Cola switched to high fructose corn syrup in the U.S. back in the ’80s instead of cane sugar. That probably explains why the taste can differ between countries. Great info!
It tasted like yak piss. The original was always better. Thankfully they saw the mistake and went back. Of course the original Coke included cocaine.
Except for one thing, Coke always switched to HFCS before the switch and so did Pepsi. My memorial bottles of Coke bottled in early 1985, old Coke formula, already had the HFCS in it.
McDonald's wasn't a sales blunder. They didn't have the ability to expand but Kroc did. If they didn't sell they probably would've closed due to competition. Selling was their best option considering the other option of losing everything.
good idea, because although there are slight taste differences between sucrose and fructose, they are basically the same product. So once you're used to one, the other one tastes funny. Whenever I buy the cokes from Mexico with cane sugar, they taste weird to me.
All in All very well done !
As a Canadian, your comments about Target are accurate. The stores didn't offer anything that other department stores didn't already have and the prices were, at best, the same if not higher. Many of the specials and the items exclusive to Target USA did not come to Canada. In short Target was just another mid-priced department store. They also bought out many Zellers stores, as the footage in your video shows, and while Zellers had been failing, it was a Canadian chain that Canadians liked. So Target had to go that extra step to overcome those feelings but they didn't. And when they left they added insult to injury by laying off thousands of staff but the CEO for Target Canada got a bonus. WTF? One important business blunder that you didn't mention was Sears not getting into on-line shopping. Sears had so much experience in catalogue orders with warehouses and the processing of orders. There weren't many companies with the background and expertise that were already in place to switch to on-line shopping. But for some reason Sears did not move fast enough into that style of shopping. We see where that got Sears.
Near the end, Sears started selling tires on Amazon that you could pick up at their stores. Had they done that 10-15 years earlier, they could at least have saved their Craftsman and Die Hard brands, which they ended up selling.
Ten cent beer night. Cleveland Indians offered beer for only 10 cents. There was a limit of 6 beers per purchase but no limits on the number of purchases a person could make. It did not go well
No, I can imagine it didn't go well. When did they run out of beer and everyone roaring drunk started to destroy the stadium?
@robertsteinbach7325 Things were bad throughout the game, but by the 7th inning, things got worse
Oh my God…that’s hilarious.
I feel like the H&M was an avoidable one. How in the hell did they not see the implication of that
In 2012, Bic Pens, the largest and most successful sellers of ballpoint pens (over 100,000,000,000 sold), decided to issue pens with pink and purple ink "for women". It failed immediately and lost them millions.
The pink and purple pens were not a failure, per se. The colours were considered not legal for signatures on contracts, some questioning even use on credit card slips. Back then copiers could not read anything but dark colours like Blue or Black. Not anymore but idea too soon.
I would have bought the purple ones. It's my favorite color. I'm always on the lookout for purple pens
A couple of other examples come to mind. One is that the successful car company Datsun decided to rebrand itself as Nissan. The rebranding created some confusion among consumers here is the USA. A second example is that of IBM vs. the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, National Cash Register, Control Data, and Hewlett-Packard) and Xerox. They all attempted to compete with IBM in the mainstream market with IBM but were relegated to supplying non-mainframe computers and components in other spaces.
Hahaha! Knowing how things turned out, these are just painfully hilarious 😂
don't forget Coke's other big blunder. They had the chance to buy Pepsi and turned it down.
You remind me of another: Yahoo! refusing Microsoft's offer of $47.5 billion in 2008.
@@smcdonald9991 Yahoo would have ruined Microsoft anyway.
20:51 I like how you worked in the failed Tropicana logo into the segment on the failure of Target Canada. 😂😂😂
A big common factor in a lot of these is lack of faith. That won't sell, that's not going to last, people aren't going to like that! So they ALL stand in that line of other people who had no faith.
Kodak not getting what digital photography would do to their film business is surely the worst.
and ALL phone companies NOT jumping onboard with cellular right away was a close second.... - just FIND an actual pay phone today...............
1:55 - I burst out laughing when Blockbuster went belly up. I rented a video, & there was a severe blizzard the day I needed to return it, couldn't even get out of the house. Put it in the return slot the next day with an explanatory note. A few months later, I tried to rent another video. The clerk said "You have to pay your fine before I rent you these." & her voice was dripping with snark. Wanted to tell her what she could do with the video, but wanted to see the movie, so sucked it up and paid both the fine & the rental fee. Wanted to kick myself. Movie turned out to not be so great. I don't even remember which one it was.
Hope she enjoyed that moment, cuz she obviously wound up losing her job. Good!
Karma's a B*tch, ain't it? ROFLMAO
U got me curious what movie it was lol
@@rustyshackleford3320 I don't remember, but it would have been ironic had it been "Donner Pass: The Road to Survival" or "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." Definitely wasn't the latter. Never was into John Candy's brand of humor, may he rest in peace 🙏
sounds like you laugh when people fall down
@@SmartJanitor Had I been present when that spiteful clerk's job fell into the abyss, you betcha. Holding my sides, tears running down my cheeks, & hyperventilating with laughter. No apologies, no regrets, just a belief in Justice.
@@domjervisYou sound like a small person........
😅I was hoarding Coca-Cola because of that blunder.. even was going to give up coke forever when all my cokes were gone.
Starbucks entry into the Australian market was quite a big blunder. There is only a few stores now in operation
Mexican Coke…is the BEST!!!😊
From Vermont (Mont Ver) is Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. Originally it had been marketed as a natural organic environmental 'green' product with the theme of a small homemade product. Now B & J has become vastly commercialised, corporate, and today is not standing up to its original standard. It is the ole familiar corporate greed of cutting back - insidiously - cheating the quality it has once stood for.
They sold out to Unilever a huge corporate giant with no soul, who just recently spun of the ice cream division to make even more money.
The engineers at Kodak invented the digital camera and the management threw it away. Xerox engineers invented the Graphical User Interface used in Windows, iPhones and Android, and the management didn't see any use for it. A lot of publishers turned down J. K.Rawlings' Harry Potter books. And the worst was Gary Kildall who didn't sign the agreement for the IBM PC's operating system. Bill gates stepped in and Microsoft is a house hold name.
Even worse for Gary Kildall, Bill Gates turned down IBM the first time because he didn't have an operating system to give them. When he got wind that Gary Kildall didn't sign IBM's agreement, Gates got a lead on a company that had an operation system for the 16 bits computers and when IBM came back, Gates signed that agreement with the codicil that IBM completely owns the hardware and he pay royalties ONLY on the operation system he sells them, leaving Microsoft to create their own operation system. So, at the end, when PC compatibles came out, Microsoft was selling PC-DOS (the one with the IBM roayalty) and MS-DOS (the one without the royalty).
@@robertsteinbach7325 You nailed it.
Texaco purchased Getty Oil in 1984 and immediately sold off one of Getty's subsidiaries - ESPN. That was before cable television became so popular. Texaco's narrow vision and resistance to diversify is probably the main reason they are no longer in business today.
With regards to Target, it wasn't only not understanding the Canadian market, it
was also about not understanding geography.
All Target had to do was look at map of the border separating Canada and
the United States.
Most, not all, of the major cities in Canada are located about a one hour drive from the
U.S. border.
When Target consumer expectations were not being met in Canada all the Canadian
consumers had to do was to hop in their cars and drive south, which is exactly what
they did.
Ironically Target ended up being in competition with themselves.
I think bringing back Coca-Cola classic made the brand stronger than it would have been
Coca-Cola did the one thing that customers hate when there are only two competitors, imitate the competitor completely. If customer wanted the competitor, they would've switched and bought from them. When they realized that, the comeback of Classic Coke salvaged the disaster.
On the positive side, it got people talking about Coca-Cola and put it in the news more than any ad could. I doubt that was the strategy but in retrospect it did work out.
Nokia-Smartphone, Kodak-Digicam, Xerox-the internet
I’d like to illustrate how McDonald’s is going to price itself right out of business
If they remake this in a few years time, it will certainly include Budweiser and Jaguar. The theme should be, 'went woke, went broke'
The Time Warner merger with AOL should be in the running for one of the biggest failures. Basically criminal how much money was involved to merge these oil & water media moguls!
The Tropicana, H&M, Decca are minor compared to Blockbuster, Kodak and Cannon.
Yeah, such a horrible business decision of those McDonald's guys for selling a business they couldn't expand for 10 million dollars a piece adjusted to today's dollars.
Only Ray Kroc could've done it. McDonald's would've been only a local chain at best under the McDonald brothers.
@@robertsteinbach7325 Dunno whether In-n-Out qualifies as a local business or national chain. It still hasn't expanded overseas AFAICS.
I just checked one source that says it's now about 15.4 million. We should all make such big mistakes.
@@robertsteinbach7325 And no shame in that either.
Ray Kroc could have created the McDonalds concept with any one of thousands of hamburger stands. The fact that the McDonalds brother did not share that vision is not a mistake on their part. They did OK for themselves in the end.
Wow. Imagine being the record label that turned down the freaking Beatles! 😮
Wonder what happened to that named (and pictured) A&R guy???
Ok, Blackberry didn't "ignore" the touchscreen era. They rushed the 9530 (Storm) to market, knowing it was faulty, and around the same time they had the major BIS outage that took all of the devices down in multiple continents. It was already downhill, they just started several steps behind consumer sentiment and couldn't recover for a number of reasons. Fact remains, they were far better secured, but non-enterprise consumer desires overweighed service capability.
you left off Woolworth and Kresge 5/10. Kresge started K-Mart, but Woolworths management contented Americans would not drive to suburban shopping centers with free parking but preferred to shop downtown. by the time Woolworth started Woolco it was too late. Then K-Mart refused to build in small rural towns and then Walmart came along a dominated the market and soon even took over the cities leaving K-Mart out.
This is one month old.
The new number one stupidest, silliest, dumbest, f@ck up is now…
JAGUAR.
14:24 - At about this time, I discovered private label / store brand 'premium' orange juice that matched the flavor of Tropicana Pure Premium juice.
Also, at about this time, the express train of all Tropicana refers on CSX railroad from Sarasota, FL, to Kearny, NJ, was replaced by a mixed express train on CSX.
I want to know why Coke changed "Coke Zero" to "Coke No Sugar." There was nothing wrong with the old recipe. I found plenty of Facebook groups asking to change it back, but Coke ain't listening to them.
Also, Arnott's biscuits changed their BBQ Shapes to some God awful flavour and there was a major backlash. So they brought back the original flavour and labelled it as Original. Thank God for that. I don't know how much they lost.
You should look at the "Masters Hardware" attempt by Woolworths in Australia, (no connection with either the US named business or the South African business, which for some reason use the same name but have no publicly known links). They tried a concept competing with "Bunnings" a BIG one stop for anything you might need, hardware chain. They partnered up with Lowes, (SP?) an American hardware provider, which due to poor performance cut ties. In the end they shut down the entire business, sustaining losses exceeding over a BILLION dollars. Woollies are grocers, where they do well, a good lesson in "stick to your knitting".
International Maxx Force Engines need to be added!
Budwiser decided to make a commercial with a transgender in a bathtub playing with bubbles and drinking Budwiser. It's one of the greatest marketing blunders in history according to some outlets. I thought for sure it'd be on here,
Swedish calculator giant Facit rejecting electronic calculators would be up there with the greatest business blunders of all time.
“Coolest monkey in the jungle”?!?! How… I just can’t comprehend the unparalleled depths of stupidity to which some witlessly plummet.
This Bud is for you
@ Only if it’s served with a fruit slice by Dylan Mulvaney. Clutch rebrand. -slow clap-
Well, I bet you the marketing team behind that commercial weren't trying to be racist when they did it. They probably didn't even realize people would understand it that way. Cancel culture hit them hard
@ As I say regarding similar situations, there are 2 possibilities: disgustingly racist or spectacularly stupid. ;-)
P.S. Did you ever see the black & white-striped shirt that had a yellow star on it? I believe it was from 2016 or so. Another magical marketing moment for the ages…
Want to echo classic brands that have fallen to pandering to the Woke religion.
1st Bud Light
2nd Jaguar
I'm pretty sure that Budwieser is still feeling the effect of Dylan Mulvaney fiasco.
The sillines of the Jaguar commercial, which did not even have a car it, convinced me to never think of buying this once proud and respected vehicle!
TATA must be wondering who the heck approved this mess!
Decca Signed the Rolling Stones, the Who and David Bowie after they had Rejected The Beatles ya know. They had learned their lessons so did not Reject the Stones and the rest.
Target’s computers couldn’t handle converting from US dollars to Canadian. Also, they didn’t take into consideration the VAT, the onerous sales tax that drives Canadians over the border to shop. They should have just opened more stores by the Canadian border. There are stores in Buffalo, for instance, in industrial areas that are there to cater almost exclusively to Canadians.
The McDonald brothers commentary is incorrect. $2.7 million is what they were eventually paid to get out, not for the franchising rights.
It'd be interesting to know just how many loyal customers Coke lost to Pepsi over their ridiculous garbage "new" Coke. It was five in my family. We were Coke die hard. We switched to Pepsi and never went back. It's too bad that greed cost them, but oh well. Maybe, hopefully they learned their lesson.
Bayer purchasing Monsanto even when Monsanto faced lawsuits for Round Up. The acquisition cost BAYER Billions of dollars in legal fees and lawsuit payments.
The Beatles never, ever would have been the same if they hadn't joined forces with George Martin.
How did you do this and not mention Google & Yahoo
Those corporate executives up in the ivory tower, typically have little sense. Whenever some new idea comes along, they never say, let's carefully try this out and see if it will work. Nope, they second the motion and jump in whole hog and create the most disasterous blunders, such as downsizing. They never eat crow and go back. They leave for a new job and let the people behind, still at the company, deal with the fallout. Often, the company goes out of business
Maybe they take ‘go big or go home’ literally.
I share some of your skepticism about highly-credentialed well-educated corporate-ladder-climbing executives who aren't necessarily thoughtful about the risks involved with major business initiatives.
coca cola classic was not the old formula, they changed the.recipe from cane sugar to corn syrup and it has never tasted the same.
Google plus was garbage
Great video hope the channel does well
If I’m correct, the “new coke” actually lead to the biggest rise in their sales after they brought back the original coke
You’re correct. In the video this is highlighted at 24:25
@@TheTaleSpotlightyeah I commented this just before getting to that part
Companies do not "blunder," people do. And people run corporations. Any new executives will always say that they will "cut costs and increase revenue." The easiest way to do this is to cut R&D and quality control, outsource technical staff to the cheapest overseas firm, increase advertising, and basically "jump the shark." At the end of the year, they give themselves big bonuses. Then they decide to take risky endeavors, like trying to enter a new unrelated market, gamble the coffers on derivitives, etc. When the company takes a nose dive, they them sell all assets (IP, computers, buildings, desks, staplers), fire everyone else, and again give themselves big bonuses, before moving on to the next company. Every one of these happened to at least one of the companies that I worked with in the past. So, no, not blunders. Greedy narcissistic sociopaths get more bonus money than those that maintain a healthy sustained business. It's all about THIS QUARTER baby.
No mention of Kodak's blunder to ignore the digital camera revolution until too late?
How about Sears? Amazon asked Sears to partner them with by putting the Sears catalog online. Sears said No.
Now if Disney would learn from their blunders they will head in the direction of Coke. But if they keep it up they will head in the direction of Blockbuster.
How about Sears. They were Amazon before Amazon was. The infrastructure was there, if they'd only had the foresight to enter the Internet age instead of getting rid of catalog sales.
LOL Thank you. I just said this to my wife the other day when she was watching a video of shopping at Sears in the 1970s.
I imagine IBM reeeeally wishes they’d bought Microsoft when they had the chance 😆
Exactly, it’s crazy how one decision by IBM allowed Microsoft to become such a giant. If they had bought them back then, the tech world would look completely different today!
Hard to believe they left out the RCA Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) video format, an error from which the company never really recovered.
How about making a video on the companies that went woke for some real blunders, like Budweiser, Disney Land, Target, Coca-Cola, and so on? That would make a great video for these times.
I really expected Budweiser to be on here lol
Me too!!!
Coca Cola's New Coke was not a blunder. It's failure was likely designed. The re-introduction of Classic Coke allowed them to replace sugar with high fructose corn syrup, which nobody seemed to notice, because the product had been unavailable for a time. Ultimately, the cheaper replacement has netted Coke much greater profits, making the loss on New Coke a non-factor. It has also created a product much more unhealthy for its users, a boon for Coke, a health plague for the public, contributing to obesity and diabetes, among other problems. The effect of high fructose corn syrup is much worse than sugar, although the industry will dispute this because of the increased profits inherent in its use.
This video contains some great examples but there are many more such as Bud Light, Kodak passing on digital camera technology, and IBM passing on Apple computers.
Blockbuster at the time when Netflix wanted them to buy them out was at the height of their rent business and didn't need to buy Netflix. Almost any company would had done the same if they were in the same position. Knowing the future is an impossible thing to know.
Of course, because American public businesses only think about the next quarter and never think about the future. If Blockbuster was privately owned they might have gone for it, given that mailing CDs was way more convenient than going to a store. Streaming wasn't a thing then and it didn't have to be for Blockbuster to have benefitted.
"Knowing the future" is not impossible. It's called vision. Steve Jobs had it in spades.
You forgot Bud Light and the Edsel. Kodak invented the digital camera but never did anything with it. Xerox invented the mouse and graphic user interface (Windows & Apple) but never did anything with it.
TBF after Decca realised their mistake they partially recovered by signing the Rolling Stones. They did pretty well.
For me it's the unforgettable blunder by NOKIA .... you know what it is
I never liked pepsi cola. I found many alternatives to Coca Cola- RC Cola was always one even before "new Coke" in the 1980's. When Coke changed I found-out that some store brands of cola were just as good and were about half the price. They are very lucky they survived. I don't know if many people have noticed the lack of store brand colas in the supermarkets since then but I'm sure it cost Coca Cola Company a lot of money to get them out of the stores and to keep them out.
The biggest example is Bud Light.
Sears was a major Blunder, they could have been the next Amazon. They had the infrastructure and everything, but they wanted to stick with stores and catalogs and they failed.
Then they bought out Kmart, which was failing badly and drained most of Sears' cash resources and actually accelerated their demise.
My company at the time ( ncr ) bought a company that dispensed dvd. You'll remember it as Blockbuster Express machines.
Worst machines ever.
Redbox machines were much simpler to work on.
I hated those calls.
It was obvious by the time those machines hit the streets, streaming just around the corner.
So, ncr spent millions $$$$ on a dying business ....
Atari. BIG blunder.
To be fair, the McDonald's brothers was more about getting screwed over than it was a blunder. And in 1961 they were each bought out for $1million after taxes.... There is no scenario where they would have ever had that net worth if they just kept running one hamburger location. They definitely got screwed over but I wouldn't call it a blunder.