Originally written by Matthew Cushen on Small Business
What did you have for breakfast this morning? A Pepsi AM? A Cosmo yoghurt? Or a glass of juice fresh from your Juicero?
No, you didn’t. You could have — briefly — in 1990, 1999 and 2017. All are spectacular, financially disastrous and reputationally costly product fails. And we’ve only reached breakfast time.
One of the most misleading clichés around is that ‘there is no such thing as a bad idea’. Complete nonsense and tweak anyone on the nose that says it before they do more damage. The world is littered with bad ideas
They come from the big corporate world as brand extensions within category — such as Pepsi introducing a pointless new variant for which the consumer had no need. Or as responses to an internally generated strategy that has forgotten to understand consumers — such as Cosmopolitan’s logical attempt to move into health & nutrition products but with a product for which their brand had no real relevance in a hugely congested category.
However, corporates rarely bet the farm on one product extension — start-ups do.
The Juicero was a $400 machine that squeezed Juicero packets of diced fruits and vegetables. Presumably, the investors that