Fancy a bottle of spunk?
In 2003, Coca Cola decided to launch its popular Dasani bottled water brand in the UK.
It was, from start to finish, a textbook example of how not to do it.
Firstly, they tried to position the product as a premium offering using phrases like ‘multi-barrier filtration’ and ‘reverse osmosis’ even though few people knew what that meant.
Really, it was just tap water.
This annoyed their water supplier, Thames Water, so much that they made a statement to the press saying that Dasani was no different from water that came out of the tap.
To make matters worse, Coca Cola spent considerable sums of money advertising the water as ‘bottled spunk’.
‘Spunk’ is a slang English word for semen.
As it turned out, most people weren’t interested in drinking a bottle of spunk.
Unsurprisingly, the product was removed from sale in the UK and millions of dollars were lost in the process.
There are plenty of other examples of similarly fun mess-ups from big brands all over the world.
Amazingly, Coca-Cola have done it more than once.
They are a reminder that a successful marketing strategy is reliant on your full understanding of the conditions and language of the market you are operating in.
What are some other great examples of marketing disasters? Share your best ones below in the comments.
