2009: The Year That Spun Marketer’s Heads Right Round

It’s that time of year when every blogger makes their marketing and branding predictions for the new year. Rather than trying to guess about the future, I prefer to look back on 2009 and reflect on the marketplace’s biggest successes, and failures, as well as what we learned from them.

MARKETING SUCCESS

Modern Warfare 2: In this dark year for marketers, Modern Warfare 2 certainly shined brightest. With their huge Hollywood-style opening, this became the biggest entertainment launch of all time, raking in $550 million worldwide in the first five days. The buzz was incredible, as they generated hundreds of millions of dollars in free publicity.

Lesson Learned: Word of mouth remains the holy grail of marketing. If you get people excited, they will sell your product for you.

Social Media: Social Media marketing officially arrived in 2009, sites like Facebook and Twitter exploded with growth. This boom has prompted deeper brand-relationships and more word of mouth opportunities. This also marked a power shift, as consumers are now in control of brands; Tropicana, Apple, Dell, and Facebook all changed policies as a result of customers speaking out through social media.

Lesson Learned: To succeed in a world where consumers now control the conversation, brands must actively listen, be transparent, and be responsive.

MARKETING MISSTEPS

KFC: In May, Oprah Winfrey promoted KFC’s new grilled chicken on her show and website, offering online coupons for free meals for a 24-hour period. Unfortunately, KFC was not prepared to meet the demand. This resulted in many customers being turned away, some locations refusing to accept the coupons, and brawls erupting in certain locations.

Lesson Learned: The Internet is an extremely powerful tool. You can harness the power of social media to benefit your brand, but it can backfire if you don’t live up to your promise.

Gatorade: At the beginning of the year, Pepsi decided to rebrand Gatorade as “G” in order to make the beverage “cool” once again and appeal to younger consumers. However, it has been a complete disaster. Pepsi has committed the greatest atrocity in brand management, confusing your customer. In the first half of the year, “G” sales drop 17.5% and market share dipped 4.5%.

Lesson Learned: Consistency is a critical element of your brand; once you begin tinkering with your brand’s look and feel, the positive associations consumers have with your brand tend to break down.

Tropicana: In January, Tropicana decided to launch a re-branding effort that replaced the juice maker’s long standing package. They removed their trademark orange and straw picture and replaced it with a more simple look. Consumers were furious as they were not able to find their Tropicana juice or they thought the packaging was generic. Sales plummeted 20% before Tropicana withdrew the new packaging. The more serious mistake occurred after the new packaging fiasco; Tropicana failed to take advantage of this opportunity to deepen the dialogue with customers.

Lesson Learned: When you have your customer’s attention, use it! Tropicana could have recouped their lost investment with positive earned media if they had engaged customers by saying “Hey, we realize you don’t like the new packaging, why don’t you help us create a new design”.

United Airlines: In the spring of 2008, United Airlines broke David Carroll’s $3,500 guitar. After trying for nearly a year to get compensation, he created a music video titled United Breaks Guitars where he exclaims “I should have flown with someone else or gone by car ‘cuz United breaks guitars”. It has nearly 7,000,000 Youtube views  and has cost United $180,000,000 according to The Times.

Lesson Learned: Fixing problems is the most powerful marketing you can do; not fixing problems is the worst.