WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

BY: IMRAN SAYED

(SYMMS MARKETING, ROLL NO.: 171)

Even the great is suspect to fallacy. Sometimes, an individuals greatest eureka moment that looked awesome on papers turn out to be a dud in real life. We are not talking about just any individual, but people who head the board of the best organizations around the world. Their decisions have huge implications on how their customers perceive their products. Whenever a new ad or a new marketing campaign is released, a lot is put on stake. The companys image and its brand equity can get severely damaged if something goes wrong. So, the managers involve a lot of caution to create some of the most creative campaigns ever. But there are several examples when the same managers had goofed up so bad that you bound to ask, What were they thinking? Some of the examples of this short-sightedness in marketing are as follows: 1. THE McAFRIKA BURGER McDonalds, in its attempt to add new menu items, introduced the McAfrika burger in one of the worlds richest nation, Norway. But when they launched the burger, Africa had suffered a famine that left 12 million people starving. To rectify the matter, McDonalds installed collection boxes for the famine in their outlets but, surprisingly, did not withdraw the burgers! 2. COKE MISADVENTURES Coca-Cola was going all out to defend its territories against the Pepsi attacks. This led them to come up with a new formula and they called it the New Coke. They forgot that Coca-Cola is thriving in the market due to its ancestry. The New Coke faced a public retaliation that made Coca-Cola revert back to their old formula that they called Coke Classic. The resulting high sales caused many to think that New Coke was just a marketing scam. So, was this the reason behind the pathetic Vanilla Coke? And talking about Pepsi, their Pepsi Blue has left a permanent bad taste in many mouths. 3. NIKE AIR Nike introduced its Air shoes in Saudi Arabia with lots of pomp. But it should have studied the Arabic calligraphy before doing so because the way in which Air was written on the shoes looked similar to the way how Allah is written in Arabic. This improper environmental scanning led to speedy withdrawal of the shoes from Saudi Arabia. 4. THE NAME GAME There are various examples of companies choosing weird brand names for their products. When IKEA named one of its products as Fartfull, many were left holding their gasps. It actually means speedy in Swedish. No guess, what it means in English. There was a toothpaste name Retardex in England, whose intention behind the name was to mean that it retards tooth decay. The Ayds diet candies that were in the market during the 70s & 80s actually tried hard to cash on the disease with the similar name. Krafts new global name Mondelez has a vulgar meaning in Russia, so do Pajero in Spain and Ford Pinto in Brazil. I think Intel is the one

of the companies in the world that has unique brand names, which do not translate to something weird in some other language. 5. THE BAD ADS This portion of the article is purely a personal view. If you differ, then its your problem. First up is the Idea 3G birth control ad. I always found it uncomfortable to watch it with my family around. The sheer double entendre of the ad was too much to bear. Also, body-spray ads, other than that of Axe, are sexist in their content. Axe ads are clever, but Set Wet ads are downright vulgar. The soft drink companies seldom release a clever ad, while others are insult to our IQ. The male fairness cream ad that keeps reciting Hi Handsome while the male steals the cream from a girls hostel is immature. JK Cement released an ad with a bikini-clad girl coming out of a sea in Goa. Can someone explain me the connection? The relentless Ha Ha Ha Ha of Akshay Kumar in a Micromax Mobile ad gave me nightmares. The early Reliance ads featuring Virender Sehwag and his Maa were hilarious and were spoofed mercilessly. Talking of mobiles, a small firm called Lemon mobile depicted a fighter pilot and did not care to draw an inference. There are many such ads and campaigns that are so stupid, so careless and so dumb that they really make you ask, What were they thinking? Thank you for reading.