Past Opinion Articles

Article for the week of 10/8/05

Worst Marketing Ideas of the Year
By, Grey Business

While the limits of human ingenuity have yet to be reached and the resources available to the truly inventive are nearly limitless, the same holds true for some of the most spectacular mistakes, misconceptions and utter disasters.
We shall take a look at the three biggest failures in the business world over the past year, so please, strap yourselves into something.
The normally popular Simpson’s line received a dramatic blow with the introduction of edible shorts, in a further attempt to capitalize on the infamous phrase “Eat My Shorts”.
To their credit the product was excellent, the taste, texture, edibility were of a high quality. The durability was limited to one wear, which was hardly a problem since they were not washable and could only be unwrapped once and never rewrapped.
Had they simply designed an edible shorts shaped cake or dried meat product of some sort this could have gone remarkably well. Even if they had broken their normal standard and entered the adult market with this product success would not have been denied them.
By producing this as an item of child’s clothing they really did invite trouble.
Headlines and pictures of pantsless children, traumatized by having their clothing consumed say more than enough.
Equally disastrous was the latest attempt at dehydrated water supplements.
No, I’m not joking.
They were all ready with designer packaging, the latest in high tech advertisements from radio to TV to podcast.
The sheer lunacy of dehydrated water supplements actually made the endorsements by Paris Hilton and two thirds of a boy band group make sense . . . As a joke anyway.
The novelty value and perception that it was all in jest meant initial sales were impressive. Unfortunately this was supposed to be a serious product.
No it was not developed by the Irish.
Or the Polish.
Probably the least worrisome of these resounding failures was the cat shaped dog.
This was least worrisome because there while there was actual genetic manipulation, it was mostly of the sort that turned orchids into snow peas.
This does not mean that the cat shaped dogs were fraudulent, there are several species of canine and feline that resemble the other existent in nature, the manufacturing methods were what ultimately did this project in, owing to the difficulty of injecting molding a dog.
While these failures may seem and in fact are highly humorous it should be remembered that they are a part of the entrepreneurial spirit of the human race, and should be seen as mere speed bumps rather than detours off the cliff edge.