5 Bizarre Brand Extensions That Befuddled Consumers

2. Colgate Dinner Entrees

Frozen food products and TV dinners were on the rise in the 1980’s, so Colgate-Palmolive Company (NYSE:CL) naturally had to offer them too. The company offered Colgate Kitchen Entrees, a line of ready-to-eat meals, in 1982, in hopes that diners would then think of using Colgate toothpaste after eating. Instead, people must have thought that the Colgate meals would taste like toothpaste. As a result, the new product failed to take off, and was even cited as a factor for declining toothpaste sales at the time. Whoops.

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