Why Brands Should Never Change Things Without Doing Market Research First

If you’re planning on making any changes to your brand, your product and its features, consult with your users first. These market research failures will show you why it’s so important.

It can be tricky designing a digital product or experience the first time around. You know who you’re building it for and you’ve gathered substantial research on the target audience. However, you won’t know how successful it’s going to be until you start marketing the product or it’s in customers’ hands.

When you have an existing brand and product that you want to change or build upon, that’s a whole different story. As time goes on and you amass ample amounts of data on your target users, it should be easier to design products, marketing strategies and experiences for them.

Yet, for some reason, this isn’t always how it pans out.

In this post, we’re going to look at four recent market research failures. From Solo Stove’s Snoop Dogg campaign to Levi’s continual misunderstanding of inclusivity, we’ll see what happens when brands make changes to their identity and products without user input or market research.

Famous Market Research Failures & Lessons Learned

It doesn’t matter how big a brand gets. If their products, branding or marketing messaging misses the mark with customers, they’re going to feel the effects of it.

Here’s how these four companies tried to shake things up within their brand and what happened when their target users responded:

1. Solo Stove & Snoop Dogg Collaboration

In 2023, Snoop Dogg was introduced as the new spokesperson for Solo Stove. In the campaign’s ads, Snoop says, “I’m giving up smoke,” and explains how he doesn’t want his clothes smelling “sticky icky” anymore.

As someone who’s closely associated with smoking marijuana, Solo Stove’s double entendre seemed clever.

The problem is, Solo Stove customers don’t buy their outdoor stoves and fire pits because the brand uses clever wordplay. Or because it teams up with pot-smoking celebrities. They genuinely like the company’s products and probably would’ve been interested in the smokeless stoves if they’d marketed them in a more straightforward manner (like their previous videos and campaigns).

Advertising the new smokeless stoves with Snoop Dogg as the spokesperson was the wrong move for this brand.

So, what happened?

For starters, the CEO ended up leaving the company. While they didn’t directly connect the failed marketing campaign to his departure, it’s clear that the company wanted leadership that better understood their target audience going forward.

Solo Brands announced this leadership shakeup in January 2024. The interim CFO Andrea Tarbox had this to say in the press release:

“Our fourth quarter results came in below expectations as we experienced softer-than-anticipated sales in our direct channel. While our unique marketing campaigns raised brand awareness of Solo Stove to an expanded and new audience of consumers, it did not lead to the sales lift that we had planned, which, combined with the increased marketing investments, negatively impacted our EBITDA.”

In sum, the Snoop Dogg campaigns made a new segment of customers aware of Solo Stove. However, the brand didn’t increase sales despite all the extra time and money they invested in the huge campaign.

The big lesson here? Stick to serving your target users. While you might see dollar signs when looking toward a new market segment, it’s always more costly to bring in new customers than it is to make your existing customer base happy. And it’s even more expensive when you target the wrong audience altogether.

2. Playboy Does Away with Nudity

In 2014, Playboy banned full nudity from its website and, in 2015, it removed fully nude women from its hard-cover magazine.

Why did they do away with nudity when that was what the brand had been built on?

In part, it was because the internet had made nude photos of women obsolete and, as such, the brand was behind the times. It was also because it no longer aligned with evolving gender roles in society.

As a result, Playboy banned nudity in order to modernize the magazine and to attract millennial readers with high-quality content and visual art.

At the time, Playboy spokespeople claimed that traffic to the website soared (about 400%) after that move. The high traffic volumes don’t seem to have made a difference though. In 2017, Playboy reversed course and brought back the nude models.

What’s interesting about this case is that the nudity removal and reversal didn’t seem to matter. If you look at Playboy magazine’s circulation numbers from Statista, you’ll see that print circulation went from 820,000 in 2015 to 700,000 in 2016 and 210,000 in 2018.

Playboy knew that something was wrong. Most traditional publications and newspapers had known that for a long time. But it seems as though Playboy didn’t understand its audience well enough to keep the magazine alive.

It went straight to removing what had made the brand what it was—attractive nude models—instead of talking to its customers to find out what they wanted from a more modern Playboy experience. In 2018, the brand finally seemed to be on the right track.

Ben Kohn, who works with Playboy Enterprises, said the following:

“We want to focus on what we call the ‘World of Playboy’ which is so much larger than a small, legacy print publication. We plan to spend 2018 transitioning it from a media business to a brand-management company.”

The ploy worked. While paying to see nude pictures of models might no longer be in fashion, the Playboy brand itself will always be iconic. And so the company has now leaned into that in order to regain favor with customers.

Kohn says:

“We embarked on a strategic review to restructure and simplify our business. We have reduced leverage and are evolving our strategy to move to a capital light model entirely focused on our most valuable brands, Playboy and Honey Birdette. This restructuring will eliminate a minimum of $15 million of costs on an annualized basis.”

The big lesson from this one? The data doesn’t lie. Never assume you know what’s best for your customers based on general market trends or perceptions. Your customers and their data will point you toward the right kinds of changes and innovations.

3. Levi’s Inclusivity Problem

From 2010 to 2012, Levi’s ran a series of ads around the idea that “Hotness comes in all shapes and sizes.”

The purpose of the marketing campaign was to promote Levi’s Curve ID clothing line. The custom-fit jeans were meant to cater to different body shapes.

The problem with the execution of this campaign is that the visuals didn’t align with the brand messaging. According to the Business Insider article above, they could only find one ad that featured plus-size women. For the most part, the models were all tall and skinny.

While body positivity wasn’t what it is now, there was major backlash over Levi’s exclusive imagery suggesting that only skinny was hot.

Fast-forward to 2023 and Levi’s still doesn’t appear to have gotten the message from its customers. Or, rather, it has, but it’s going about it the wrong way.

When Levi’s announced a partnership with Lalaland.ai, the brand explained that the solution was meant to improve the online user experience. Whereas their product pages only contained a picture of a single model, this collaboration would enable them to include multiple models more easily.

“Today, LS&Co. announced our partnership with Lalaland.ai, a digital fashion studio that builds customized AI-generated models. Later this year, we are planning tests of this technology using AI-generated models to supplement human models, increasing the number and diversity of our models for our products in a sustainable way.”

In order to diversify its product imagery, Levi’s chose to use AI-generated models wearing their clothing instead of hiring real models. As you can imagine, the backlash was swift.

Model Efosa Uwubamwen explained:

“There are plenty of diverse models who want to work. Unless you’re talking about saving costs, and unless that’s a goal across the board, then that’s a different conversation. If you’re talking about diversity, then it becomes quite a strange proposition, if you ask me.”

Levi’s acknowledged the backlash. However, they have not reversed course. They’ve simply said that AI will enable the brand to provide more personal imagery for every customer to look at while simultaneously coming up with a more sustainable way of generating photos for the ecommerce site.

It’s too early to tell if this policy change will impact the brand’s earnings. While models are aware of the AI-generated imagery, it might not be so obvious to customers. So this could be one of those cases where the brand gets away with not soliciting input from their target base first.

4. WooCommerce Rebrands Itself as Woo

WooCommerce is an ecommerce plugin and platform used solely on the WordPress content management system. Since 2015, it’s been part of the WordPress ecosystem and it’s gone by that name since then—WooCommerce.

In late 2023, however, the company decided to change its name to Woo. Not only that, it started to change its products to the shortened “Woo” name and also began to migrate to the new Woo.com.

According to David Callaway, the VP of Creative and Communications, the brand did this for its customers and merchants:

“‘Woo’ is how many loyal customers have referred to us for years. And now we’re leaning into that name for our company and brand. It’s a fun, punchy name that shows how excited we are to empower success for merchants and developers. Switching to Woo.com is part of this larger strategy.”

The change was not supposed to impact customers. Yet, in 2024, Woo/WooCommerce had to do an about-face.

On April 9, the company returned to its original domain name. And it posted this explanation to the blog:

“Moving to Woo.com created challenges for our users to find WooCommerce in Google searches, which were made worse following Google’s March update. To address those challenges, we assembled a group of SEO experts and consultants to evaluate the best way to build on the strength of the WooCommerce brand. We collectively believe that reverting back to WooCommerce.com will deliver the best outcomes for WooCommerce and the wider Woo community.”

The website still retains the Woo logo. It’ll be interesting to see if it remains that way or if the visual brand identity remains disjointed from the URL (kind of like what Twitter is experiencing now with its “X” logo).

Robert Brandl has been reporting on this rebranding issue on LinkedIn.

Traffic for WooCommerce (the brand) plummeted with the domain change. Whereas it was about 360,000 every day prior to November 2023, the new Woo.com domain name failed to even reach half that traffic at its highest point.

Users appeared to really struggle with finding the company’s website after the switch.

Now, this is a tough one to consider. Because WooCommerce might have consulted with customers and asked how they felt about rebranding. It’s not like the average customer would understand or even think through the ramifications of a technical change such as this one. Nevertheless, it should’ve been a problem that the company could foresee.

What’s more, the company should’ve thought through why it needed to rebrand in the first place. In the quote above, Callaway talks about the name being fun and punchy.

But did WooCommerce as a brand need to be reinvisioned in a lighter way? Or was it just another case of a company trying to adapt to a market with new players that seemed more fun and youthful? I think the biggest lesson we can learn from this failure is that, if you have a long-standing and popular brand, don’t ditch what makes it so reliable and easy to find or use.

According to Brandl, who is monitoring the situation, the domain name reversal has had a significant and positive impact on the brand and its customers. Web traffic to WooCommerce has surpassed 200,000 in the second week of April 2024. I suspect it’ll go back to where it was by the end of the year.

Why It’s Vital to Know Your Users Before Changing Anything

It’s clear that, in the examples above, these companies failed in their implemented changes because they lost sight of their customers.

In Solo Stove’s case, they went looking for a new market of users with an ill-chosen influencer. If they’d researched or asked their existing customer base about their interests, they probably would’ve discovered that they didn’t care about Snoop Dogg or punny ad campaigns.

In Playboy’s case, they tried to solve the problem of dwindling sales by removing what put the brand on the map in the first place. If they’d more closely researched the company’s sales, they would’ve realized it wasn’t an issue of nudity, but an issue of not providing users with modern products and experiences.

In Levi’s case, they attempted to market a new product to all customers, but failed to visually represent them in their ad creatives. Ten years later, they decided to improve their image diversity and inclusivity, but went about it all wrong.

And in WooCommerce’s case, they underwent a rebrand and domain change that left customers confused and unable to find them online. If they’d worried less about having a fun brand name and focused more on the users’ experience, they might never have gone down this road.

Bottom line: It’s too risky to work off of assumptions. Assumptions that your users will love your brand, find your brand or buy from your brand no matter how much you change about it.

Instead, if you’re planning to change the digital product and its features, your branding or anything else about the user experience, consult with them first.