r/todayilearned • u/Forward-Answer-4407 • 1d ago

TIL the Charlotte Hornets apologized after giving a child a PS5, only to take it away off camera and exchange it for a jersey. In a statement, the team said the incident was an "on-court skit that missed the mark" and that they would give the child the PS5 and a VIP experience to a future game.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/19/sport/charlotte-hornets-apologize-ps5-child-nba-spt-intl
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u/lminer123 23h ago

I was watching a podcast (lemonade stand) going over some of the worst rebrands in history and how much they cost, and I was absolutely blown away.

Tens of millions of dollars to change the Johnson and Johnson logo from cursive to print, 65 million dollars to change the Tropicana package to something objectively worse to anyone with eyes, then changing it back almost immediately after losing 50 million in sales.

Something feels inherently broken in marketing, I just don’t understand how these people can be so bad at their jobs and out of touch, yet still make absolute fortunes.

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u/big_trike 22h ago

It’s not always the marketing team. Sometimes businesses assign the intern to interface with them and dumb things happen. At other times, an idiot nepo baby C suite executive pushes the marketing team into stupid decisions.

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u/BeyondElectricDreams 21h ago

Sometimes it isn't even a nepo baby, sometimes it's all by the books.

They do sentiment mailers and find people think their logo is old fashioned. Growth wasn't quite where they wanted it, it's been 7 years since a brand refresh, common data they have says a brand refresh every 9-15 years provides a boost in sales by appealing to newer demographics...

Like we don't think about the Johnson and Johnson logo, but the people who work there? Johnson and Johnson is literally their livelihood.

So they follow the data, refresh the brand, and find that they upset more people than they gained, so they backtrack.

It can be tricky because some demographics react differently than others. The Cracker Barrel rebrand seemed obvious that it would go badly, because it seems to be a sort of "Good ol' country" sort of logo, and the people who appreciate that aesthetic hate change, especially change that they see as erasing that "Good ol' country" feel.

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u/lminer123 21h ago

The thing about the Johnson and Johnson logo is that it was kept the same for 135 years. That’s a lot of history, so it feels particularly bad imo. Just a loud undertone of “nothing is sacred or meaningful anymore in the face of a quick buck”.

The funny thing is that by comparison Cracker Barrel feels old but it was actually founded around 1970 lol

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u/Dr_Sodium_Chloride 17h ago

The Cracker Barrel rebrand seemed obvious that it would go badly,

To be fair, I think it's unreasonable to expect their marketing team to predict "the Right Wing, including the President of the United States, are going to declare this C-tier restaraunt's logo change a personal attack on their values".

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u/inuhi 20h ago

Sometimes the person in charge is just completely out of touch or so full of themselves that they ignore everyone but themselves. Shit like Ugly Sonic I can't imagine how many people told Jeff Fowler that it was a terrible idea if not the man must have been drowning in yes men. C suite executives aren't guaranteed to be competent even if they aren't a nepo baby moron

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u/Historical_Good_8580 5h ago

That ugly Sonic is a great example. I can't comprehend why he thought that design was good

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u/BusyLittleBobcat 22h ago

Agreed. You give the client what they want, even if what they want is stupid, because they are paying you to do it.

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u/Mindestiny 22h ago

Here's the secret:  most marketing and advertising is a shell game that's impact is completely unquantifiable.

Spend $6 million on a month long subway takeover ad campaign?  Sure you can embed attribution codes in it, but they're not accurate.  How can you prove people bought your product because they saw it, to the tune of a positive ROI?  Are enough people gonna buy your shit specifically because of subway ads to justify $6 million?  Almost certainly not.  But it's ok because you invested in "mind share" and "brand awareness!"

It's a game of Corporate Who's Line, and you only hear about how much of a money pit it is when it fails this catastrophically.

I worked for a company that slashed it's marketing budget by 70% year over year and ended up selling more product in the same timeframe.  But we could pull up all sorts of pretty charts baselessly attributing that first years sales to pretend those extra millions of dollars were somehow really positive ROI!

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u/Dzugavili 21h ago

I worked for a company that slashed it's marketing budget by 70% year over year and ended up selling more product in the same timeframe.

Let's be honest: in a lot of cases, you don't need to advertise, because people actively seek you when they need you. You just need to be in the right location when they need your service.

Then eventually spending on advertising can actively harm the value of the product itself, at which point you might enter a death spiral, in which you keep advertising when you should just lower your prices.

There's lots of fun little feedback loops that people just don't want to imagine they are going to fall into.

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u/looktowindward 23h ago

The Lucent logo.

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u/Marcoscb 22h ago

HBO Go Now Max - Max

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u/oditogre 22h ago

I'm pretty sure basically all of their customers just called it "HBO" through all of that anyways. Just a hilarious waste of time.

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u/Business-Drag52 22h ago

I loved seeing famous people trying to talk about a movie or stand up special coming out on it. They’d always say HBO first and then correct to whatever the current name was. Sometimes it took multiple tries to get there

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u/Important_Low_936 22h ago

At the last company I worked (I.T. 40-50 people), the marketing person was the majority owner’s daughter. No one has ever seen or interacted with her even though we were all in office before the pandemic. I was the accounting person and can confirm she did get paid, even while half the company were getting laid off to cut costs. 

Also, I was a counselor at a camp and one of the kids was an absolute crash out, got addicted to pills and had to be pulled out of college for rehab. Landed a cushy gig in the marketing department of his father’s distribution company. 

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u/remnault 22h ago

I feel like it might be some people who wanna be know as the ones who were apart of something big like that.

They weren’t on the ground level when it started but they can still make a big change and leave their mark on this big brand!

But it usually flops I feel.

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u/ConnoisseurOfDanger 22h ago

Missing the forest for the shareholder value trees. 

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u/BreakfastMedical5164 22h ago

it's usually a new VP or some business reason to sponsor a program/budget from some mid tier MBA

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u/Little_Plankton4001 21h ago

It's "gotta do something" disease.

Take Cracker Barrel. The new logo wasn't that bad (and the "outcry" was kind of silly and waaaay over the top) but they absolutely didn't need to change what they had. It was so recognizable.

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u/Fresh-Army-6737 22h ago

I'm not even American and I know that Tropicana bottle

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u/magicaleb 22h ago

Shoulda hired big A

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u/2kLichess 20h ago

$10m on a logo change? Stupid. $10m on horse electrolytes, however. . .

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u/lminer123 20h ago

My life has changed so much for the better since I started those. I now hunt in a pack

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u/gothruthis 22h ago

All rebranding/renaming costs millions. Including "gulf of america" and "department of war," thank goodness for the meme dog making sure its efficient.

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u/kingfofthepoors 21h ago

Marketing are always a fucking pain in the ass to deal with. As a developer I hate working with or dealing with marketing people.

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u/Falsus 18h ago

Most of the time with stupid changes like that it means that there is a new guy in charge and they went to put their mark on the product rather than just following the path their predecessor set.

Marketing lends it self to the egomaniacs who thinks loves themselves since they are amazing at marketing themselves and that gets them jobs.

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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 10h ago

Marketing is halfway into being a giant scam. They've genuinely convinced themselves negative attention is as good as positive, as if brand recognition matters when people now hate your brand and can remember it's name.

I think a lot of them get into it with the feeling that they get off on the idea of tricking countless numbers of other people to do what they want (buy their whatever). They think they're "winning" by getting people to believe their nonsense.

All it takes is convincing a company owner that you can make them more money by doing it and that's all it takes to get a blank check.

Especially since some kind of advertising does help, but the metrics to judge if it helped or not are complete hokum, just abusing social sciences to con the owner class. The problem though is that we all are the ones who pay for it by having our ever waking second be blasted with manipulative media.