Orbitz

One of the strangest beverages ever created has to be Orbitz. This funky, non-carbonated drink was launched in 1996 and featured floating edible balls that resembled nothing other than maybe a lava lamp. When it first came out, it created a huge buzz and intrigued the minds of even the most skeptic consumers. Surprisingly, this drink was also developed by Clearly Canadian but had a much shorter product life cycle than their sparkling flavored water.

So what happened to this cosmic creation? While the gel spheres intrigued consumers enough to buy it once, the poor offering of flavors did not keep customers coming back for more. Flavors like Pineapple, Banana, Cherry, Coconut and Vanilla Orange were just plain awful. What were the developers thinking? The reason why nearly all products fail, poor sales, forced Orbitz to take a quick exit from the marketplace. This appears to be a classic case of marketing myopia. Clearly, the product developers became so fixated on the aesthetics of the gel spheres that they forgot about the most important feature of a beverage, the taste. One last point, it seems that the product developers were not just deficient when it comes to marketing. After discovering that their slogan was, “Defy Gravity. Get into Orbitz,” they probably should have brushed up on there physics as well. Although I am nearly a decade removed from my last physics course, don’t objects depend upon gravity to remain in orbit? Just a thought.