Guest post by Shailendra Jain, associate professor of marketing, UW Foster School of Business

Apple has been called “the most admired company in the world.” There are some good reasons for this. Apple is very innovative, very cool, very personality-oriented.

But while Apple’s iPhone has achieved landmark success in the United States and redefined the smart phone category, it has so far struggled in two of the world’s largest markets. The iPhone has yet to create much interest in India and is, at best, a fledgling brand in China.

It has not met the success in these markets that Apple expected for a variety of reasons.

First is a technology issue. In India, the market I’m most familiar with, the iPhone has compatibility issues. That’s an amazing thing to ignore. Your product has to be aligned with the context in which you are marketing it. Apple, reportedly, is in talks with carriers in China and India to overcome this compatibility issue and is believed to be launching an iPhone with CDMA technology, which is compatible with Chinese and Indian telecom standards. It will be interesting to see whether this enables Apple to capture a larger chunk of these two enormous markets.

Second is a pricing issue. At its introduction, an iPhone cost about the same price in India as it did in the U.S. (about $700). But the way consumers process price information is interesting. In India, many potential customers reasoned that for the price of three iPhones they could buy a Nano car. And they were not sure if this was a good trade off. For these consumers, Apple may have gotten the price wrong. They may have ignored the how people in these countries process price information.

A third reason is that people in India are used to an unlocked phone. Apple does not want people to buy unlocked versions of its phone. But the moment there is a gray market where people can buy another compatible version of the iPhone, Apple will be challenged.

A fourth reason—and this is personal speculation—is a misalignment of “softer” brand attributes. What Apple as a brand means in the U.S. is very different from what Apple means in Asian countries. It was born in the U.S. and has produced a long line of successful “i” gadgets—iMac, iPod, iPad—whose branding is rooted in individuality. This is clever branding, and has been a good fit for an influential segment of the American and Western population: rebels, early adopters, would-be innovators who want cutting-edge technology and are relatively less sensitive to price. In Asian countries this is not such a strong fit, in terms of perceived personality. Asian cultures tend to be more collectivistic, and the theory is that millions of consumers in these cultures may find “i” less appealing than “we.”

For the iPhone, a whole set of factors converge to the same outcome. And I think this is typical of marketing failures. Rarely is it the fault of one or two factors. Usually it’s a complex confluence of multiple factors—product design, pricing, revenue model, distribution, promotion, branding, competition. Underestimating your weaknesses or overestimating your strengths. More often than not, multiple factors feed into most marketing failures.

See 15 Cautionary Tales: Failed Marketing Campaigns for more information.

Guest post by Dan Turner, senior lecturer in marketing, associate dean for masters programs and executive education at the UW Foster School of Business

New Coke is—for my money—the most epic new product fail in marketing, more so than the DeLorean, Apple’s Lisa and Newton, Sony’s Betamax, and even the Edsel.

Many people have selective memories about the Coca-Cola Company’s decision to launch the product and the initial consumer reaction. Coke’s market share had been falling for years, and consumers overall expressed a strong preference for Pepsi over Coca-Cola in blind taste tests. The new, improved, sweeter formulation of Coke tested extremely well, with more people preferring the New Coke formula over both “old” Coke and Pepsi.

In a naïve way, it made perfect sense for the Coca-Cola Company to improve their product, making up for a known deficiency versus a focal competitor. In fact, sales analysis trends immediately following the product launch showed significant gains for the Coca-Cola Company. In informal blind taste tests, Seattle retiree Gary Mullins, founder of Old Cola Drinkers of America, failed to distinguish between old and new Coke or expressed a preference for the latter.

Of course, we know the rest of the story. The public revolt ensued shortly thereafter, and it had little to do with the taste of the soda. In launching the new version of Coke, the Coca-Cola Company had a made a fundamental error in forgetting the source of the value it was truly offering consumers.

A soda that tasted good was nice, but Coca-Cola really offered value on the basis of its strong, favorable, and unique brand associations: America, friendship, nostalgia, and the like. In changing the formula, the company walked away from all of these sources of value, and customers reacted strongly, emotionally, and in a predictable fashion.

The silver lining for the Coca-Cola Company rested in the fact that the re-introduced product, Coca-Cola Classic, created a firestorm of marketing communications activity, reminding consumers why Coke was so great in the first place and dramatically communicating the value of the brand.

See 15 Cautionary Tales: Failed Marketing Campaigns for more information.

Guest post by Elizabeth Stearns, senior lecturer in marketing, UW Foster School of Business

When the Beetle was first introduced in the early 1960s, people would joke that you could go up a hill or you could have heat in a Bug, but you couldn’t do both. It was a quirky car, to put it mildly. Even VW engineers called it a lemon.

But the company positioned the Beetle as a different kind of automobile with a unique personality in a series of funny, brilliant advertisements. It found a target audience that was really interested in expressing their own personality, and they found this car was an extension of who they were. A generation of Beetle drivers reveled in its lack of frills. They didn’t care if you could drive up the hill with the heat on.

Then when the New Beetle was introduced in 1998, decades after the original was retired, the big issue was: how do you guide Baby Boomers down memory lane while also attracting the younger generation, because you need to grow that market and the Beetle is an entry vehicle into the VW line?

Cadillac had tried to attract younger drivers for years and failed because they simply did not want to drive their father’s car. There was the same danger for the reintroduced Beetle. It’s very difficult to design a campaign that successfully reaches two different demographic targets.

But VW pulled it off. The campaign was genius, with modern taglines like “Less flower, more power,” that sparked nostalgia in Boomers and spoke individuality to Millennials. The result was immediate success, creating a new “odd-shaped” category that would soon see competition in the reintroduced Mini Cooper, the PT Cruiser and others.

The original Beetle is a superb example of a flawed product saved by great marketing. And the marketing that launched its reintroduction was even better.

See 15 Cautionary Tales: Failed Marketing Campaigns for more information.