The latest dust up in the news cycle about the rebranding by Cr--ker Barrel got me thinking. There are obvious similarities with the companies and products listed in the thread title. All made poor marketing decisions that alienated their core customers.
Coke pivoted, apologized, ditched New Coke, and still thrive.
Anheuser-Bush doubled down on their DEI message and still hasn’t recovered. I keep their products page open in a browser tab on my phone and haven’t had one of their products since.
Cr--ker Barrel is TBD but seem to be doubling down. Going to be interesting to see what the board does with the CEO.
SAS came out with Viya and went all in trying to sell a technology that wasn’t wanted or needed instead of slowly rolling it out. The fact Viya also didn’t have a workable migration path to move customers that were interested from SAS 9 to Viya should have been an obvious red flag. It was marketed almost exclusively to new customers and we literally stopped marketing SAS 9. If customers weren’t interested in Viya they were ignored. I even heard of sales reps, who have a Viya sales target, withholding SAS 9 invoices (which means no renewal setinit) trying to force customer to move to Viya.
There was sort of a mea culpa a few years ago and a SAS 9 division in R&D was established. The new division was announced with little fan fare yawn. The good news is that SAS 9 is entrenched in the day-to-day operations of many organizations and performs well for them. But for how long? I’m just guessing, but I would bet software revenue for SAS 9 is still at least 95% of the total. Not based on facts though. Would love to see the real numbers. At least Viya will always have the hosting and consulting revenue going for it!!