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Big-name branding fails, and 

what you can learn from them 

— 
by James Smart
2 months ago | 11 min read Build a business Logo & branding 

T
here have always been branding fails, but in the digital age,
public disapproval can brew faster than ever. Some branding
fails have become legendary: there have been motorbike-themed
perfumes, illegible logos and Super Bowl buzzkills, while one
unfortunate campaign left a sticky pink flood on the streets of New
York. Here’s our guide to some of the biggest and worst branding
fails in history.

Illustration by OrangeCrush

Why branding fails matter

—
Branding fails provoke strong reactions. Some people may feel
betrayed by a product that no longer represents their values, while
others may just be delighted to see a giant company cut down to
size.

But the history of branding fails isn’t just about angry

demonstrations or gleeful retweets. These were strategies that
companies believed in, and in some cases spent millions of dollars
on. But they missed their target and ended up making their brand
look unappealing, hypocritical, or just plain confused. If you’re
launching a new product or campaign, these big-name missteps
help you decide how to market your product—and learn what you
absolutely shouldn’t do.

Pepsi and North Face wade into

controversy
—
Hitching your wagon to a prominent cause can be a great way to
make your brand part of the conversation. But if you don’t walk the
walk, your talk may sound a little empty.

Shortly after Black Lives Matter protests swept US cities, Pepsi shot
a 2017 commercial in which Kendall Jenner crosses a street protest’s
lines to give a police officer a can of Pepsi . Calls to boycott the
brand soon followed, with observers noting that Jenner passes her
wig to a Black woman before joining the protest, and wondering
whether decades of racial oppression and violence can really be
resolved by a model with a chilled can of pop.

Via Business Insider Youtube

Then in 2019, North Face took pictures of models wearing their

outdoor clothes everywhere from Scottish mountains to Brazilian
national parks and posted them to numerous Wikipedia pages. The
result: when people looked up some locations and activities—on a
site that’s defined by its independence—they landed in the middle of
a PR campaign. Wikipedia and its users were not amused, and North
Face scrapped the campaign and issued a contrite statement saying
that they “believe deeply” in Wikipedia’s mission and “apologize for
engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles”.

The problem, of course, was that their actions showed they had very
little respect for Wikipedia’s proudly objective editorial stance. Like
Pepsi, they’d engaged with an issue on a very surface level, and the
gap between their pious message and profit-chasing tactics made
them look foolish.

Learning: Linking your brand with a cause you’re already deeply

connected with is one thing, but if the public senses hypocrisy, they’ll
hit you where it hurts.

Logos gone wrong: the London

Olympics and Gap
—

The London Olympics soared. Its logo, less so, via London2012

A logo is brand central. Who can forget the ornate but instantly
recognizable curls of Coca-Cola, or Apple’s bitten fruit? When logos
work, they’re modern alchemy, combining brand associations and
sharp design. But when they don’t work, they’re a bewildering and
often very expensive mess.

Take the 2012 London Olympics logo, which sought to “make people
reconsider Olympics, to think about them in a different way,”
according to branding agency Wolff Olins’s then managing director,
Ije Nwokorie. The Wolff Olins-designed logo certainly disrupted
something, but arguably it was people’s ability to read: while the
games went well, the logo was a cramped, ugly mess.

The London Olympics branding

at least has some fans, but
clothing giant Gap’s attempt to
rebrand itself fell so flat it
backtracked within a week. The
company flipped its old logo—a
simple, clean text-in-a-box badge
Gap’s new logo 2010 lasted a week, via Wikipedia Commons that spoke to its line of classic Ts
and jeans—for an alternative that
set Helvetica lettering over a small blue box that screamed
“anonymous accountancy firm.” Developing and switching the logo
back is said to have cost Gap $100 million.

Learning: Disruption can fall flat: the best logos tend to speak to
brands’ strengths and heritage, rather than just aping current styles
or trying to pull a brand in a different direction.

Burgers, bicycles and knowing your

customer base
—

Fast food can be sophisticated by Khramova

In 2013, keen to bring health-conscious eaters into their restaurants,

Burger King introduced Satisfries to their menu. Thanks to a less
porous batter, Satisfries contained 30% fewer calories than the
chain’s standard fries. But a combination of a higher price, a tongue-
twisting name, and the fact that most visitors to Burger King weren’t
after healthier food doomed the new product. It wasn’t helped by a
would-be edgy social media campaign that used the hashtag
“WTFF”—which meant “what the french fry” but was drowned by
less family restaurant friendly Tweets.

They weren’t the first fast-food

chain to try to attract a more
sophisticated audience: back in
1996, McDonald’s sought to attract
discerning adult customers with a
vast marketing campaign
spearheaded by the Arch Deluxe.
“The burger with the grown-up
taste” was promoted with a Arch Deluxe burger breakdown from an advertisement via Wikipedia

campaign that focused on its

“secret” mustard and mayonnaise sauce and classy ingredients. But
while high-end burgers are big business these days, the product was
a poor fit for a family-friendly restaurant whose customers
appreciated old favorites at a competitive price. The campaign cost
McDonald’s $300 million; the Arch Deluxe had been phased out
completely by 2000.

These fast-food fails are just the tip of an iceberg lettuce. Other
brands that misread their target market’s appetite for new products
include gun brand Smith and Wesson, who briefly sold mountain
bikes, and iconic motorbike-makers Harley Davidson, who had
several attempts at making perfume.

Learning: Diversification can open up profitable new areas, but not

sticking to what you’re good at is risky. If the new products cut
against your brand persona, loyal customers may feel confused or let
down.

Snapple and Nationwide get the

wrong kind of attention
—
The world’s largest popsicle, in New York City, in the summer? It
sounds almost too perfect, and it was. Instead of gathering a
Guinness world record and some excitable social-media coverage,
soft-drink maker Snapple’s 2005 PR stunt left kiwi and strawberry
ooze spreading over Union Square. “We didn’t see the pop,” a local
worker told the New York Times, “just the pink water flowing down
the street.”

Snapple’s record attempt led to disaster, via AP Archive

The combination of a vibrating delivery truck and high temperatures

may have melted the center of the giant flavored-ice sculpture,
which Snapple had to hurriedly tidy away. In place of the 171.5 ton
giant, they ended up presenting the supporting ice sculptures, which
had stayed frozen but were about the same size as a regular TV.

Further evidence that if you’re going to take the biggest stage, you’d
better be damn sure you command it, comes from the 2015 Super
Bowl. The game saw the New England Patriots’ edge out the Seattle
Seahawks in front of 114 million viewers. The first-half ad break saw
a deeply bleak commercial for Nationwide Insurance about a boy
who never got to experience life’s great milestones—because he died
young.

Nationwide Insurance’s Super Bowl ad, via USA TODAY Sports

The ad had apparently resonated with test audiences, but

sandwiched by the razzmatazz of the Super Bowl, it felt like a jarring
piece of fear-mongering. The spot alone cost over $4.5 million, which
is a lot to pay for a furious Twitter storm. Nationwide claimed to be
glad they’d started a conversation, but the next year they sensibly cut
their losses and didn’t run a commercial.

Learning: Attention-seeking is fine, but if you’re not well prepared,

and don’t read the mood right, you can end up looking very stupid.

Drinks giants lose

loyal customers
—
Changing the packaging on a
product is usually a fairly safe
move—but a branding fail hit
Tropicana to the tune of $50
million. The firm’s flagship
Tropicana didn’t change their oranges, but they did change their
orange juice had always featured
branding via Engin Akyurt
an orange with a straw in it. The
company decided to change tack
and instead show the juice itself, gleaming in a clear glass, with the
opening cap remodeled to look and feel like a small orange and the
strapline focusing on the juice’s 100% purity.

Tropicana’s rebranding was far from fruitful, via Quezco

The change aimed to attract health-conscious consumers, but

customers found the new branding looked cheaper (something
perhaps compounded by the fact that the drink’s “pure premium”
message was now less visible), while many had an emotional
connection to the image of the straw-pierced orange. By switching
multiple parts of the product design at once, Tropicana alienated
their market. Sales dipped 20%, and the company soon went back to
its original artwork.

The most famous soft-drink fail came from Coca-Cola, whose 1985
New Coke has become a legendary disaster. Aware that they were
losing market share to Pepsi, and believing Boomers were
transitioning to diet drinks, Coke decided to hook a Gen X audience
with a sweeter cola. The drink that became New Coke performed
well to focus groups, and Coke made a momentous decision: rather
than running the new drink alongside Coke, they would streamline
their growing product lines, and jettison the old drink.

A huge marketing campaign

backed the launch, with the old
Coke phased out and new cans
and bottles, complete with
“New” branding and a chunkier
font. At first, the signs were
good, but discontent was
growing, especially in the
American South, Coke’s historic
heartland. Coke hired a
psychologist to listen to some of
the complaint calls: they said
some callers sounded like they’d
just lost a family member. With
sales struggling and bottlers
raising concerns, after 79 days
Coca-Cola accepted failure and
reintroduced the old flavor. The
move was praised in the US
Senate, and by 2002 New Coke
Via Coca-Cola
had been totally phased out.

Coke’s experience shows the problem of changing a brand that sells

itself as “the real thing”. Once you mess with tradition, you mess
with people’s memories of their youth, and their stories of who they
are.

Learning: suddenly altering a much-loved product, or the packaging

it comes in, is dangerous. People like the familiar, and to change
multiple aspects of a brand can feel like a threat to your audience,
especially when you take away their ability to choose the product
they love. Innovation is best done with care.

Branding fails and how to avoid

them
—
All of these companies believed in their branding strategies at the
time and backed them with millions of dollars of funding. They look
absurd with hindsight, and there are lessons to be learned. Brands
should only get on board with causes they’re fully engaged with,
should treat existing logos with care, should stick to what they’re
good at and should be cautious of novelty stunts.

We love to tell stories of branding fails so much that a few have

become exaggerated in the telling—the much-mocked Colgate
lasagna never really existed, for example. And many companies
claim to have pulled something positive from the flames: a Coca-
Cola executive said in 1999 that New Coke was a “success” because
it “revitalized the brand and reattached the public to Coke”. These
case studies should help you build better campaigns, but every
brand will fail sometimes. If your marketing doesn’t hit the spot, you
can listen, learn—and try again.

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The author Related articles

James Smart Villainous brands: when fairy tale

James is a writer, editor and consultant branding becomes reality
with two decades' experience in content.
When he's not covering culture and
marketing for companies including Lonely How to successfully rebrand: a
Planet, DK and the Guardian, he enjoys strategic and tactical guide
stretching his hamstrings while his
children climb play equipment. You can
see what he's up to here. 6 principles for successful branding
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