Marketing flops: Typology and cases

The aim of this thesis is to come up with a typology of marketing flop areas. Therefore I will present 90 marketing failures and analyze them in regard to the obvious and less obvious reasons for the failure.1 Furthermore, the case studies will be categorized according to the marketing function in which the mistake occurred. I will then present characteristics common to the cases in each category. To ease the accessibility of the text, references will only appear in the tables integrated into the section. In the second part of this thesis, three cases will be analyzed in-depth concerning how the decisions causing the marketing mistake were made. Therefore I will provide a summary of the decision in question as well as of its objectives and consequences, to then retrace the different steps that lead to the wrong decision. For each of these cases, I will also outline how the failure could have been prevented. Finally, I will shortly summarize the most important results of my research. I will also mention which limitations I encountered while preparing this thesis, and suggest further questions that, in my mind, are relevant to research in the field of marketing flops.