Brand Failures

268 Brand failures
91 Ovaltine
When a brand falls asleep
In 2002, the Ovaltine brand celebrated its 98th birthday. That same year, it
closed its UK factory and was forced to admit it had finally lost its main
market. The Ovaltine brand was put up for sale and, at the time of writing,
no interested buyers have emerged.
First produced by a Swiss food company in 1904, the malt drink with
added vitamins became the UK’s favourite bedtime drink. However, although
commonly sipped to get a good night’s sleep, the original advertising for the
brand highlighted opposite qualities. Indeed, Ovaltine was an official
sponsor of the 1948 Olympics and was billed as an ‘energy drink’ years before
the term became widely adopted. In 1953, it was used by Sir Edmund Hillary
on his famous Everest expedition and it was even reported to cure impotence,
decades before the arrival of Viagra.
Curiously, this image was reversed in the later 20th century, and it became
more popular as a cure for insomnia than a tonic for athletes and the sexually
challenged. As Mark Lawson wrote in the Guardian in June 2002, it also
became seen as a drink for the elderly through advertising campaigns steeped
in nostalgia:
The singing kiddies of the radio show, winsome in their Winceyette
pyjamas, were accurate reflections of contemporary childhood at the
time they started but, as they continued to be the official faces of the
brand, kept sending the subliminal image that it was something your