Monday, April 12, 2010

Cola for breakfast and other bad plans.

This morning I was looking for examples of planning gone horribly wrong, for use in a work planning session I'm hosting in Yellowknife, NWT, next week. Even though we all know they exist, I found it surprisingly hard to find a couple short anecdotes. Here are a couple of the ones I did find:

(original blog post of these stories here)

Pepsi AM

- In the late 1980s, Pepsi saw an unexploited consumer: the breakfast cola drinker.
- Although they hadn’t conducted much market research, they thought many young adults would rather drink a caffeinated cola for breakfast, instead of a coffee.
- Pepsi failed to assess that there was no demand for a separate product for breakfast consumption.

Maxwell House ready-to-drink coffee

- In 1990, General Foods launched cartons of Maxwell House ready-to-drink coffee.
- The refrigerated cartons couldn’t be microwaved in the original container. In order to enjoy your convenient cup of coffee, you had to pour it into another container before popping it in the microwave – thus eliminating the convenience.
- Maxwell House failed to plan on how they would reach their objective of providing ready-to-serve coffee.

If you know of some other great misadventures in planning, please share them.

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