Every year around this time, the Fox News Business Page outlines a half-dozen or so of the year’s biggest business failures, and every year I find at least one product that I predicted would fail big in one of these posts has ended up in the listings. This isn’t that surprising in itself – I’m a failure analyst by vocation, and occasionally profession, and I enjoy the odd bit of schadenfreude as much as the next guy. But when you consider that I don’t work for any company that produces or distributes consumer goods, and haven’t for over a decade, I think it says something about my natural affinity for trouble that I keep spotting these turkeys. Troublemakers know trouble, I always say, and some of the things on this list were obviously trouble coming down four lanes of highway. Although, in fairness, I suspect than the average ten-year-old would have reached the same conclusion…
Consider, for example, the Fiat 500 (number 6 on this year’s list), the subject of the laughably bad CGI commercial I wrote about a few weeks back. It might surprise you to learn that the commercial wasn’t the worst thing about the product, but consider this: the vehicle is smaller than a Mini, gets lower gas mileage than a Honda Civic twice its size, and costs nearly $20,000 for the fully loaded version and $15,000 for the stripped version. It’s hard to say if the new version will be more reliable than previous iterations of the design, but the original was so problematic that Fiat actually discontinued them for several years, and the company is still trying to improve its image in the U.S. after years as a laughingstock…
Then there’s the RIM Playbook, a tablet device that is supposed to do all of the things that an iPad does, but doesn’t have any applications available (compared to the tens of thousands available on the famous Apple product), and the HTC Status, a rather expensive web-enabled cell phone that has, as it’s only major selling point, a special button that allows the user to access their Facebook page. Since you can get to the Facebook mobile site just as quickly from any other smart phone, it’s hard to imagine why this feature would be worth extra money to the purchaser (it doesn’t offer any added value, you see) but somebody at HTC evidently thought it did – and somebody at AT&T thought enough of it to offer the thing through their resale units…
I don’t think we can, in reason, be quite as harsh on some of the other items on the list. The Chevy Volt, as noted elsewhere, has the potential to bring the new General Motors into the hybrid market and actually take on the Toyota and Honda products on even terms. It’s unfortunate that GM is still having problems getting enough of them to the dealers, getting the price down to a competitive level, and dealing with safety issues (the battery pack is said to catch fire without warning) and image issues (people keep talking about the supposed battery fire issues), but I don’t think the Volt is an actual failure yet. And the 3-D film “Mars Needs Moms” had a disappointing reception, but compared to “Water World” or any number of other expensive failures, it’s hardly an Epic Fail…
The real prize on the list, at least from where I’m sitting, is the “Ashley” Push-Up Triangle from Abercrombie Kids, a division of Abercrombie & Fitch geared towards children ages 8 to 14. This one is something a ten-year-old might have missed; kids in that age range DO want to dress increasingly like grown-ups, and they probably would like the product. That didn’t keep parent groups from having what Fox calls “a violent reaction” to what is effectively a padded bikini top, or keep child development experts from blasting the whole concept. Fortunately, the company was able to sweep the whole line under the rug before things got any worse, but the potential for self-immolation here exceeds most of the other entries; this could easily have destroyed the entire division, if not the whole company…
Anyway, that’s a wrap for this year. Check back next December, folks, and we’ll see what they come up with next...
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