Some products are marketed so well that everyone wants to try them.
Then everyone wants their money back.
Others are genuinely good products that never get the chance, simply because nobody understands why they should care.
That’s the uncomfortable thing about marketing. It can make a bad product famous, but it can’t make customers love it. And a great product can sit quietly, unnoticed, without the right story around it.
We’ve seen both happen more than once.
When the marketing is bigger than the products
Take New Coke.
In 1985, Coca-Cola changed the formula of one of the most recognizable products in the world. This wasn’t a reckless gamble made in the dark. Coca-Cola had run extensive taste tests, and it had the research, money and marketing power to make the launch enormous.
Consumers rejected it anyway.
The backlash was so strong that Coca-Cola brought the original formula back just 79 days later.
What’s interesting is that Coca-Cola never had an awareness problem. Everyone knew Coke. The problem was that people didn’t want that version of it. No campaign could talk consumers out of an emotional relationship with the original that went far beyond taste.
That distinction matters. Marketing can persuade someone to try something, but the experience of using or consuming the product eventually becomes the real advertisement.
Juicero pushed the same problem to almost comic extremes. The company built an expensive, beautifully designed machine that squeezed juice from proprietary packets. It attracted serious investment and plenty of attention.
Then people discovered they could squeeze the packets by hand.
The question suddenly became less about how impressive the technology was and more about why anyone needed the machine in the first place.
That is a difficult problem for any marketing campaign to solve. If the value proposition doesn’t survive closer inspection, more attention isn’t necessarily going to help.
When attention can’t fix the experience
OLX in Nigeria tells a quieter version of the same story.
The platform became a familiar name, and its marketing did what marketing is supposed to do: it brought buyers and sellers onto the platform. But an online marketplace depends on something advertising cannot manufacture on its own – trust.
When users encounter fake listings, scams or transactions that go nowhere, awareness stops being the issue. The customer is already there. What matters now is whether the experience gives them a reason to come back.
When the story fails to make a clear difference
The reverse can do just as much damage.
Tropicana found this out in 2009, when it redesigned the packaging of its Pure Premium orange juice. The goal was to give the brand a cleaner, more modern look. Instead, consumers struggled to recognize something they had been buying for years.
The familiar orange-and-straw image was gone. Sales fell sharply, and Tropicana eventually reversed course and brought the old design back.
The juice hadn’t changed. The way people recognized it had.
That’s easy to underestimate from inside a brand. Marketers can spend months debating color palettes, typography and visual systems, while the customer is simply trying to find the cart they bought last week.
Packaging is often treated as an expression of a brand. In practice, it can also be part of the navigation system. Change the signals people rely on to find a familiar product, and even a perfectly good product can become harder to choose.
Premium products doesn’t automatically create a premium brand
Volkswagen’s Phaeton takes the argument somewhere deeper.
Volkswagen built an expensive, technically sophisticated sedan designed to compete with established luxury manufacturers. The problem wasn’t that the company didn’t know how to build a premium car. It was that consumers had spent decades learning what the Volkswagen name meant.
Practical. Accessible. Reliable.
That made it difficult to ask those same consumers to associate the badge with a luxury vehicle costing luxury-car money.
People weren’t only buying the engineering. They were also buying what the car represented.
The Toyota Crown Sport offers a more contemporary version of the same tension. Its aggressive design has drawn comparisons to the Ferrari Purosangue, and it is sometimes described as a “budget Ferrari.” The comparison itself is revealing.
The Crown Sport can have the design, features and engineering of a premium vehicle, but the Toyota badge brings decades of associations with it. Put a similar silhouette behind a Ferrari crest and the immediate associations are exclusivity, performance and status. Put it behind a Toyota badge and some people see a more attainable alternative to the thing they actually want.
The car hasn’t necessarily changed.
The meaning attached to it has.
That is one reason Toyota’s creation of Lexus is so significant. Rather than asking consumers to suddenly reinterpret Toyota as a luxury name, the company built a separate brand whose entire identity could be associated with luxury.
It is a useful reminder that positioning isn’t simply about finding the right words to describe a product. Sometimes the brand itself has to carry the meaning you want consumers to attach to it.
Sometimes, people simply don’t understand the products
Nintendo’s Wii U ran into a different problem.
The Wii had already earned enormous goodwill. But when the Wii U arrived, many consumers weren’t immediately sure what they were looking at.
Was it a new console? An accessory for the Wii? What exactly was the tablet-shaped controller supposed to do?
The product could have plenty of useful features, but consumers shouldn’t need to solve a puzzle before understanding what they’re being asked to buy.
This is where marketing does some of its most important work. Not creating hype, but reducing confusion.
A product can be perfectly capable and still struggle if its value isn’t obvious.
Being better doesn’t always mean being chosen
Then there is Betamax.
Sony’s Betamax was widely considered technically superior to VHS in several respects. It is still lost.
The reason is that consumers weren’t buying video technology in isolation. They were buying what rental stores stocked, what manufacturers supported, what was affordable and, eventually, what everyone else already had.
VHS benefited from a broader ecosystem and greater adoption. Once enough people had chosen it, that adoption itself became an advantage.
That’s the part of product competition that can be difficult to see from inside a company. Teams can spend years making something faster, smarter or technically better, while the market is making a completely different calculation.
Consumers don’t award points for technical superiority. They choose what is available, understandable, desirable and useful to them.
Sometimes the market’s favorite product isn’t the objectively best one. It’s simply the one that fits the market best.
So what actually makes the products successful?
Maybe the real question isn’t whether marketing can save a bad product.
Maybe it’s whether we’ve been asking marketing to do jobs that belong to the product, and asking the product to do jobs that belong to marketing.
Marketing can create awareness. It can shape perception, explain why something matters and give a product a place in culture.
But the product still has to deliver on the promise.
And a great product still needs someone to make that promise clear.
That’s why product and marketing were never really competing forces. They solve different problems.
A product has to give people a reason to stay.
Marketing has to give them a reason to look.
Branding helps them recognize and remember it.
Positioning helps them understand where it belongs in their world.
When those things work together, marketing isn’t disguising a bad product or rescuing a forgotten one. It’s helping the right product reach the right people, communicate it’s value clearly and become something they have a reason to choose.
Because great products don’t always sell themselves and great marketing can’t make everything worth selling.
