From corporate marketing wars that fail to compromising on liquor ingredients and paying the price, we count 15 times companies have been awful decisions for greed, ignorance or desperation.
15 – Star Wars,
- It was 1977, Star Wars hadn’t even released when 20th Century Fox did the dumbest thing ever – they handed all merchandising rights to George Lucas
- In return all they got was a measly $20,000 dollars, but George became the head of a 3 billion dollar plus company with reach all over the globe, its profits continuing to grow with each passing day
- Fox had absolutely no idea what Star Wars would become, and for this blunder they missed out on claiming one of the biggest media franchise trademarks ever
14 – Cosby Show,
- Before The Cosby Show passed into the hands of NBC, becoming a huge hit right from the first season, ABC passed on their chance to get a slice of the pie
- Cosby made a pitch to ABC for the show, but they wouldn’t offer him a commitment without a script or pilot ready, so he turned to NBC where it catapulted from third on the Nielson ratings to 1st for 5 more entire seasons
- It went on to become the biggest hit of the 180s and almost single-handedly revived the sitcom genre
13 – E.T,
- 1981, the blockbuster hit E.T the Extra Terrestrial – Steven Spielberg approached Mars the confectionary company to feature M&Ms as a small plot device in the film
- The chief executives at Mars declined outright and the producers behind E.T were forced to go with their second choice: Hershey and their Reese’s Pieces
- When the film was released, Reese’s Pieces were having dire sales but then E.T came along and sales of the candy triples with re-orders coming in as many as 10 times a day for over two weeks
- Mars, pissed at the missed opportunity, heavily implied they’d never even received an offer
12 – Kodak,
- We’re in the age of rapidly advancing technology with the first digital cameras only appearing in the early 90s
- But 15 years earlier in 1975, Kodak made the world’s first ever digital camera with a patent ready for mass-production – but they did nothing, and so let their competitors invent it first
- The reason? They didn’t want to destroy the film industry and subsequently end their own company, but had they produced this revolution for mass market, you might’ve ended up with a Kodak brand smartphone
- Instead, they went bankrupt in 2012 and fell into obscurity
11 – Schlitz Beer,
- Back in the 70s, Shlitz was one of the biggest beer manufacturing companies in all of America only behind Budweiser
- Then they made a fatal decision – to cheap the ingredients in order to produce beer faster, which, for a while, worked quite well
- But then people began to notice that the beer would form floaties in the bottom which congealed into a thick mucus – and Shiltz didn’t recall them, even after realising
- Eventually they had to cave in, but not after 10 million cans had been shipped, crippling their finances and ending their juggernaut company not even 10 years later
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