What were the most notable brand missteps of 2017? By that I mean company mistakes not big enough to cause the company to withdraw a product or brand from the market but serious enough to put the company in danger. In 2015 one candidate was obvious: Volkswagen. The company is still trying to recover from the scandal surrounding its fraudulent emissions test results. New Coke back 30 years ago was a different sort of brand misstep, ultimately leading to an actual product failure.
My candidates would be Uber, Tesla, and the NFL. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Uber didn’t last another year. And I can’t believe that Tesla has survived as long as it has. The proof that Joe Bessimer was right.
Just for the record it’s too early to tell if the Trump brand has been injured by Donald Trump’s presidency.
Are the numerous celebrities fired or forced to resign due to sex scandal allegations considered a misstep? Could be a comeuppance, but so was VW. There are also other people not directly implicated who seem to have taken publicity hits like Matt Damon and Meryl Streep, though I have followed closely.
Did Harvey Weinstein have a brand? If so, he certainly counts. Maybe Charlie Rose, too. I’m not sure any of the rest of the casualties to date have much of a brand to fail.
The real chief villain, the infotainment industry as such, doesn’t appear to have suffered much. It’s like blaming the paint job while not criticizing the automobile company.
I don’t attribute the terrible, awful, no good box office year on the scandal. I blame it on the movies. Does anyone think that this year’s movies would have been hits but for the scandal? I think the causality goes the other way. If it had been a good box office year, if Harvey Weinstein had a recent hit, there would have been no scandal.
Miramax was/is Weinstein’s brand.
I think Tesla will become like other niche high-end car companies. At best it may be the car equivalent of Apple.
Another candidate is EA with its terrible monetizing strategy for the Star Wars Battlefront 2 video game. It got so bad that Disney threatened to pull their license.
Matt Lauer stands out as well, fired from one of the most lucrative contracts in TV.
I suppose one way to look at it is through the non-disclosure agreements. Rose McGowan settled against Weinstein for $100,000 and when it was discovered this did not include a non-disclosure, he offered $1 million to get one. That $1 million seems to be purely brand value. Probably most of Bill O’Reilly’s payouts are to protect his brand. OTOH, there are some third-tier celebrities like Danny Masterson who I assume will never be seen again because they are completely replaceable. His brand isn’t worth much, but now it has a negative value.
There’s a big difference between Apple and Tesla. Apple has shown a profit every year for the last 35 years except for during the John Scully years. Tesla has never shown a profit. It’s hemorrhaging money.
That’s the reason for my comment about Joe Bessimer.
Tesla will continue puttering along as long as its investors keep floating it. That may not be much longer. The real comparison for Tesla isn’t with Apple but with Delorean. Uber has the same problem in spades. No one is really sure that its business model is viable: neither Uber nor Lyft, its main competitor, is operating at a profit.
In a real sense Tesla, Uber, and Lyft are following the Amazon model: backing a business model out of an IPO. They’re testing whether there’s still an opportunity for that. It ain’t the 90s any more.
Surely this counts as a misstep of some sort: Days after iPhone battery fiasco, lawsuits against Apple begin to mount.
Yeah, that counts. I saw that as one more small step in Apple’s long decline.
I don’t think the NFL has made any missteps — they’ve mostly been a victim in the fight between Black Lives Matter and the alt-right. They cannot control what Trump tweets about, nor can they force their employees to engage in political speech under their current contracts.
Papa Johns, on the other hand… they decided this was an awesome thing to get involved in. A smart company avoids getting embroiled in culture wars.
Others that come to mind:
United Airlines, for the handling of the removal of a passenger, but maybe more for mishandling the subsequent publicity.
CNN, for a series of fake news stories and evasive explanations that basically lowered its reputation to that of Fox and MSNBC.
McKesson.
In the case of UAL neither passenger miles flown nor stock values reflect any issues. I’d say that the effect of the incident on UAL has been negligible (unlike VW).
The major airlines are really hard to damage. They all have local monopolies. It has to do with the business models of airports.
I’m not as familiar with CNN’s business situation so I really can’t say.
steve:
Yeah, McKesson’s a really good example. The company basically self-immolated. Could have been worse, I guess. The stock price could’ve gone all the way back down to $63/share (its price for years).
Equifax
Equifax hasn’t been hurt as much as I would’ve expected. Its stock is down to $119 from a high of $145. It really looks as though the company will skate on an event that should have led to its shuttering its doors.