Can Anyone Explain These Crazy Things?

I admit that it's easy to be a Monday Morning Quarterback. But there are some things in the world of business and marketing that just seem so hard to understand when you first see or hear about them that you've got to wonder "what were they thinking?"

Here are a few recent examples:

1. AIG

How could they have not known that passing out bonuses using government bailout money would finish off the company's reputation permanently and forever kill the AIG brand? There is no way that AIG as a brand can survive now and I doubt that any attempt to rename the company and continue in business will succeed either. The leaders of AIG have got to be the all-time biggest business boneheads in history. Are we going to put even more bailout money into this disastrously mismanaged company? I sure hope not. What were they thinking?

2. Gatorade

An old colleague of mine responded to one of my recent postings where I criticized Coca-Cola for some of their latest brand positioning moves with a right-on comment about Gatorade's recent re-branding. For now, they're still calling themselves "Gatorade", but the brand name has disappeared from the front of their packaging. We now see nothing but a big ugly generic-looking capital "G". Why on earth did they do that? How did they convince themselves that it made sense and was a wise thing to do? Are we about to start hearing them call the brand "G"? What were (are) they thinking?

3. MSNBC

They decided to air a segment that attacked consumers suffering with "underwater" houses due to the mortgage lending/housing market crisis. There may be a few scrooge-like ultra right wingers out there that have no sympathy for fellow Americans having to deal with this crisis, but that is not exactly the prevailing sentiment. MSNBC rightfully got taken to the woodshed by John Stewart of Comedy Central and then the media circus was on. An avalanche of negative publicity for MSNBC ensued. How could MSNBC have lost touch with their viewers and American public opinion that badly? Fat cat on-air announcers with big-money contracts who are not feeling any financial pain are not representative of the average American. What were they thinking?


I'd love to hear from anyone out there who doesn't think that each of these things are crazy-headed "what were they thinking" examples of pure marketing insanity.