Although it is true that some people are naturally talented when it comes to business, you don’t often become a big shot without making a few errors along the way. A huge part of becoming successful is not being afraid to take risks, especially when you know that sometimes those decisions might not pan out the way you wanted them to. Here we have a collection of some big mistakes made by well known businesses and the impact that they had that you may not have known about. Take a look!
It may come as a surprise to you that the well known department store ‘JCPenney’ faced huge struggles a few years back. They wanted to stand out against competition and go against the norm by eliminating what they called ‘fake prices’ and scrapping sales.
The choice was made to stop hosting sales. Instead, the business would alter their existing prices so that they would ‘reflect what used to be sales prices’. They also decided that prices should be whole figures meaning that none of their price tags would end in ‘.99’.
It was thought to be an excellent and strategic move to win over customers but instead it did quite the opposite. People love a sale and the feeling that they are bagging a bargain. Removing that sense of satisfaction that they have ‘scored’ resulted in a decline of customers and decreased word of mouth as people weren’t bragging about their awesome sale finds.
In fact, the change was such a mistake that JCPenney’s revenue decreased by 25%. What was even worse was that almost 20,000 employees ended up losing their jobs.
‘Coca Cola’ has had a huge following since its creation many years ago. People just can’t get enough of the coke taste. Proving this, more than 1.8 billion Coca Cola drinks are consumed each day. But, there was a time when the business took a huge hit. In 1985, Coca Cola launched its ‘new Coke’, that had an altered flavor and formula.
People were less than happy with the change, so much so that a mere 3 months after the launch, Coca Cola brought back its much loved classic version.
Thankfully for the drinks giant, after bringing back their fan favorite it didn’t take very long to recover. Customers were once again happy and sales went back to normal. Sometimes, you should just leave a good thing alone!
However, we do sort of see why Coca Cola took the plunge. In a taste test, results showed that almost 200,000 people preferred the new formula! But, in the grand scheme of things, that probably wasn’t a high enough amount of people to reflect their huge amount of consumers.
If you came across someone today who hadn’t heard of ‘The Beatles’, you would be likely to tut and ask how that’s possible as they are such legends. However, there was a point where they were just a group of young lads from Liverpool hoping to make their way into the music industry.
Back in the 60’s, 1961 to be exact, the boys tried to get in with ‘Decca Records’, a record company who they obviously weren’t signed to.
Although it was never completely proved, the story goes that Dick Rowe, an employee at Decca Records told The Beatles’ manager that their type of band (guitar centric) was about to become unpopular. Clearly, Decca Records monumentally missed out with the fame The Beatles ended up amassing.
We’re moving on now to a company that passed up on to opportunity to buy ‘Google’, yes, you read that correctly. It involves a once popular search engine called ‘Excite’. Don’t worry, we had never heard of it either.
Passing up on the opportunity to own Google sounds utterly ridiculous now, but before it became big time, it was pitched to the CEO of ‘Excite’ for just $1 million. For some unknown reason, the offer was declined. Admittedly, at that time Google was a seemingly small fish in a large lake, however, anyone could have seen the potential it boasted.
To make matters worse, Google went back to excite with a second proposal…
They tried to shift it for a mere $750,000, which would equate to a whopping $170 billion today. We can only imagine that the people over at Excite hold many regrets about not bagging the company that now earns roughly $60 billion per year. We certainly would!
It’s fair to say that ‘E.T the Extra-Terrestial’ is a hugely iconic movie. It may have come out in the 80’s but people still love it to this day. It’s one of those films you can remember everything about even if you haven’t watched it for a very long time. Any fans of the film will recall the scene involving ‘Reese’s’ pieces. This scene was actually meant to involve a trail of ‘M&M’s’ but the distributor ‘Mars’ decided not to be featured in the movie.
Now, it wasn’t like this was crippling for Mars and M&M’s because they are both much loved to this day by many. However, after the movie, Reese’s sales rocketed by 65%. What was Mars thinking?!
‘Hershey’s’ lucked out big time as they invested only $1 million which gave them the rights to use the film’s name and characters on its products. The candies advertised saw sales triple within two weeks, so much so that many vendors couldn’t keep up with demand.
Football is a game with a huge amount of followers. You get your die hard fans and then those who watch every now and again but there’s no denying how popular the sport is. Some people like nothing more than kicking back with some snacks and cheering on their team. The more interested fans will know that Monday Night Football is a big deal.
So, you would think that any network would jump at the opportunity to broadcast it. But, both CBS and NBC made the awful decision to do just that. This sucked for them but was great for ABC.
Unfortunately, the other broadcasters were apprehensive to move their already popular Monday night shows. The risk would have been ultimately worth it however as Monday Night Football went on to be one of the longest running and highest rated series of all time.
Many of you reading this will be familiar with ‘AOL’. Back in the day, it was used by many people. But, in recent times, it’s very much considered a thing of the past, and it could be down to a fatal merger.
Back in 2000, the news broke that AOL and ‘Time Warner’ had agreed to merge. This didn’t seem like a bad thing as what’s not to like about the internet and TV branching together?
However, the regretful merger resulted in the companies collective value shrinking, leading to numerous job losses. Not only this, but it also caused the decimation of retirement accounts and investigations by the Securities and Exchange commission and the justice department.
This was terrible news as the $350 million merger was ‘the largest merger in American business history’ back in 2010.
With our technology consumed world, it can be hard to believe that bookstores such as ‘Barnes & Noble’ are still going strong. There are now more ways than ever to read (or listen) to a book without actually having to go to a store and purchase one. For some of the more old school book readers, you may recall a store called ‘Borders’.
It seems that the cause of the store’s demise could be when it was bought out by ‘Kmart’ in 1991. Over the space of 5 rocky years, numerous CEO’s were put into place. It seems the company was so focused on who was running things on the inside, they were oblivious to what was happening in the outside world.
Come 2011, Borders decided to go out of business, though they may not have had much choice in the matter. One business who managed to benefit from this was Barnes & Noble who were sold all of the trademarks and customer lists previously owned by Borders.
