Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Nike has suspended the eight-year, $70-million contract it renewed in 2010 with tennis star Maria Sharapova after she announced yesterday that she had failed a doping test taken during the Australia Open in January, where she advanced to the quarterfinals. Porsche this morning said that is will “postpone planned activities” with the 28-year-old, Russian-born athlete. And Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer said it would not renew a deal with Sharapova that expired at the end of 2015. 

The banned substance in her system, meldonium, is a drug manufactured in Latvia that is not legally available in the United States. Sharapova said her family doctor had prescribed it for her a decade ago for several health issues. She admitted she had received an email on Dec. 22 announcing the ban but said she had not clicked through on the link....

From purple ketchup to baby food for adults, these brand extensions were nothing short of miserable failures.

Brand extensions, or when a company rolls out a new product that’s still connected to their core brand, are a mainstay of the food product industry. Most are well-thought-out, field tested, and happen to make a lot of sense: Oscar Mayer’s known for its lunch meat, so why not buy little rounds of their turkey, with cheese, crackers, a drink, and dessert, all packaged up in a tidy box? Lunchables were a hit when they were rolled out in 1988 for that very reason: it made sense, and parents trusted that the brand would be able to provide a decent, complete lunch for their kid.

However, while the brand extensions we’ll be taking a look at today might have made sense to some exhausted brand development executive somewhere, they certainly weren't hits with the general public....