The worst business decision in history (video)

The video I am sharing is an excellent and entertaining summary of the biggest business mistakes in corporate history. But the truth is that these kinds of mistakes are being made daily in most companies – including in our very own iGaming. Of course, not on such a vast scale, but the impacts can still be severe for your business. I advise to watch and see if any of these themes might be happening in your organization.

The top things I took away from this video were:

1.) A failure to rebrand or make an important change, just because you are afraid of change, can be fatal. Just because something was working up until recently, it does not mean it will work for ever. Be flexible to changing environments and don’t let your business die – look at the experience of Ayds candy bars!

 2.) As the Kodak, Netflix/Blockbusters and Google/Excite experience show, you must think of the future and make every business decision with that future in mind. If not, you can miss out on fantastic opportunities. iGaming companies should think about new niches which may (or may not) grow in time and keep a small development/content/SEO budget reserved for them. “From small acorns big trees grow.”

 3.) The Schliz beer experience shows just how expensive it can be to cut costs and scrimp on quality. This is probably one of the top things to learn for iGaming businesses. We have all seen the strategy of pumping out an extreme amount of cheap, crappy content because of the ‘content is king’ belief. If you are planning this strategy, please consider ‘quality content is king’ approach instead – especially since Google has been warning you about this for years. The same goes for low quality Fiverr links and acquiring links for the sake of acquiring links. Google hates this approach and is creating algorithms to punish it. In the end, this cheap-is-good approach will backfire, and you will lose more than you would gain. If you have a low budget, then as long as you focus it on quality over quantity, you will do fine. The best affiliate sites started with little money, but a lot of heart and passion.

 4.) The Quaker/Snapple purchase shows why a failure to understand the product and failure to market it to the right audience is fatal. Sadly, lots of marketers think there is a “one formula to succeed for all markets and products”. Obviously, that is not the case. In iGaming there are a lot of different demographics with different mindsets and favoured marketing channels. Right now, eSports is a hot topic. If you want to enter this market, you NEED a Twitch channel, as that’s where most of the gamers are. But bingo is a totally different audience (chatrooms) and the casino bonus world is different again. Make sure that your marketing approach is customer centric and product oriented. If you fail to do this, your product will fail.

 5.) Time Warner’s purchase of AOL shows that buying a business without understanding the product and its potential is a bad strategy. I see a lot of website acquisitions in iGaming where the buyer just sees the current income, without fully appreciating why the website became such a good product, and/or not having a competent team in place to take care of the product and grow it. If you fail to continue growing the products you buy, and pleasing the visitors, you will be wasting time on your acquisition and you will not succeed.

 6.) Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Myspace – and then stuffing it with ads - shows the problem of monetizing before building an outstanding product. We all want to make money, of course, but sometimes it is smart to wait before milking the cow. Social networks needed time to develop as a product experience before they could be turned profitable. Facebook didn’t turn a profit until 5 years after it started. Mark Zuckerberg just wanted to work out how to make a compelling product first and knew he would figure out how to profit from them later. It’s the same with the best iGaming brands – they spent years building a loyal audience who trusted them.

Let me know if you agree or if you learned something else. As well, do you know of any other big business fails that you would add to this list?