2026

ALDI sells hoodies at cost and makes the money elsewhere. Five-euro Aldidas trainers were reselling for 40 on eBay the same evening. Merch as an advertising budget.

Apple crushed a piano, a guitar and a camera into an iPad. Two days later it apologised and pulled the TV campaign. Samsung answered within a week.

Skittles removed lime in 2013 and got nine years of anger. Then it apologised to all 138,880 complainers by name. Sales rose 7.4%, the best in the brand’s history.

Duolingo killed its owl with a Cybertruck. Two weeks later: 1.7 billion impressions, 38% download growth and 5 billion lessons completed. Plus one credit dispute.

Only 2% of women called themselves beautiful. Dove built a 20-year platform on that number and doubled sales in three years. It still cannot answer one question.

Campaigns with a sound identity are 8.53x more effective than visual-only ones. Budweiser, Oreo and Spotify proved it, and one of them ended up publicly apologising.

KitKat hijacked the skip button. Tony’s copied its competitors’ wrappers. Toblerone made its shape a personality. Three chocolate campaigns, with the numbers.

SPANX was valued at USD 1.2 billion in 2021. SKIMS hit USD 5 billion in 2025. Same category, opposite playbooks, and one of them changed the rules instead of the product.

Jellycat revenue grew 70% to GBP 333 million while the toy market shrank. The strategy: retirement dates, staged pop-ups and a billion TikTok views it never paid for.

Restaurants were refilling Heinz bottles with cheap ketchup. Instead of hiding it, Heinz turned it into a public crime scene. Sales rose 8% and 33 new contracts followed.