Big brands with massive budgets still create total product flops - here's why.

Dove’s Real Beauty bottles was massive failure.

The "Insight": Research showed only a small percentage of women saw themselves as beautiful.

The Idea: New bottle shapes to celebrate different body types.

.......People were not impressed.

Women felt reduced to a plastic bottle, and the message came off as superficial. Dove pulled the special edition, but the damage was done. They weakened their powerful “Real Beauty” positioning.

The lesson?
Big budgets and fancy “insights” don’t always relate to products that people will buy.

If you don’t test demand, you’re just guessing.

How could they have avoided this.

1.Talk to customers: 1-on-1 interviews could’ve flagged these red flags early on.

2. Test real interest by:
- Running a small EDM campaign for an exclusive to see if people would buy, and follow up with those who did/didn't and why
- Creating social media posts / ads targeted to a small number of people with the concept of bottles celebrating a woman's figure and seeing how people reacted


-----> Beware of building products based on customer insights alone. You have to test demand (not everyone wants to pay you to solve their problems).