24 of the biggest failed products from the world's biggest companies

Nintendo Virtual Boy

Launching a product is tough.

"Less than 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed first-year sales of $50 million — considered the benchmark of a highly successful launch," say Joan Schneider and Julie Hall, coauthors of "The New Launch Plan."

That's part of the reason that the most heavy-hitting names in business — from Pepsi to Netflix, Microsoft to McDonald's — have had some of the biggest belly flops.

Here's a look at 24 of them and what we can learn from these epic fails.

Aimee Groth, Jay Yarow, and Drake Baer contributed reporting to this story.

1957 — Ford Edsel

Bill Gates cites the Edsel flop as his favorite case study. Even the name "Edsel" is synonymous with "marketing failure." Ford invested $400 million into the car, which it introduced in 1957. But Americans literally weren't buying it, because they wanted "smaller, more economic vehicles," according to Associated Content:

"Other pundits have blamed its failure on Ford Motors execs never really defining the model's niche in the car market. The pricing and market aim of most Edsel models was somewhere between the highest-end Ford and the lowest-end Mercury."

It was taken off the market in 1960.

1975 — Sony Betamax

The 1970s saw a war in home video formats between Betamax and VHS.

Sony made a mistake: It started selling the Betamax in 1975, while its rivals started releasing VHS machines. Sony kept Betamax proprietary, meaning that the market for VHS products quickly outpaced Betamax. Though Betamax was technically superior, VHS won out by simply being ubiquitous.

1985 — New Coke

In the early 1980s, Coke was losing ground to Pepsi. The infamous "Pepsi Challenge" ads were largely responsible for Pepsi's surge. In response, Coca-Cola tried to create a product that would taste more like Pepsi.

While New Coke fared well enough in nationwide taste tests before launching in 1985, it turned out those were misleading. Coke abandoned the product after a few weeks and went back to its old formula. It also gave its product a new name: Coca-Cola Classic.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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