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STEPH MCGOVERN:Hello, I'm Steph McGovern, and I report for the ����ý on all sorts of issues and news to do with business, jobs and money. Now because of my job, I get to spend a lot of time visiting places like this, this incredible car factory, to look at how businesses work and how things are going for them.

STEPH MCGOVERN:Now to be successful in business, you've got to trusted by your customers, so people have to believe that the car, or phone, or trainers that they're buying are as good as you've told them they are in any advert you put out.

STEPH MCGOVERN:A good marketing campaign can be crucial in the success of a new product, but shoppers don't like it if your claims don't add up, and sometimes what goes up must come down.

STEPH MCGOVERN:Now here's a great example from the past, it's the tale of Sunny Delight. A fruity drink that had a bright start before things turned very gloomy indeed.

EVAN DAVIS:Consumer giant Proctor & Gamble has long been famous for washing up liquid and nappies, but in 1996 it made its first foray into Britain's lucrative soft drinks market. Competing with Coca-Cola and Pepsi was always going to be a challenge, so P&G enlisted the help of advertising gurus Saatchi & Saatchi.

CRAIG MAWDSLEY:Sunny Delight was an opportunity for us, not only to create a great market in the UK, but also potentially to build this into a global brand.

EVAN DAVIS:Sunny Delight was already selling well in the US, so Saatchi & Saatchi tweaked the clever American marketing to sell it in the UK

ANDREW MARSDEN:It was a really stonking launch. It was very, very well thought out, but I think the thing that surprised us most, or certainly me most, was the fact that they managed to get it into the chilled cabinet.

EVAN DAVIS:P&G's research had shown that customers liked the idea of freshness that the chilled bottles suggested.

RITA CLIFTON:What's interesting about "fresh", is that it tends to be equated in consumer's minds with "healthy". And of course the holy grail, as far as mothers are concerned, 'is to find drinks for their children that have a combination 'of healthiness, but also they're appealing to that age group.

RITA CLIFTON:On the surface, Sunny Delight seemed to be the ideal solution to that problem.

EVAN DAVIS:As stores stacked their chiller cabinets with the drink, a £10 million ad campaign showed thirsty children reaching for the distinctive orange bottles.

MARK BORKOWSKI:There was a really quite extraordinary call to action commercial creators. It was kids running in from playing, outdoor pursuits, hot, sweaty, thirsty.

MOTHER IN AD:Oh no, he's back, they're all back.

KID IN ORANGE TOP:Mum, can we get a drink.

MOTHER IN AD:Go on.

MARK BORKOWSKI:Opening the fridge door, and I think the shot then came out of the fridge and they were grabbing this bright, fluorescent orange, garish bottle.

KID IN ORANGE TOP:Orange juice, cola, some purple stuff, and this new Sunny Delight!

MARK BORKOWSKI:Open it, chucking it all in, and then quenching their thirst. It was very, very powerful and kids wanted it.

KID IN ORANGE TOP:Brilliant.

KID IN GREY TOP:That's the last of it.

MOTHER IN AD:Oh no, it isn't!

KID IN GREY TOP:She's alright, your mum.

ADVERT VOICEOVER:New Sunny Delight, the great stuff kids go for.

MARK BORKOWSKI:A real power of advertising moment.

EVAN DAVIS:Within four months, Sunny Delight was the nation's third best-selling soft drink. Supermarkets doubled, then tripled their orders.

CRAIG MAWDSLEY:It suddenly became one of the most successful grocery launches of all-time. The sales took off so fast that our initial problem within the first few months of launch, was about trying to reduce demand for it, not increase demand.

CRAIG MAWDSLEY:We couldn't make the stuff fast enough.

ANDREW MARSDEN:It was the most extraordinary thing to see. 'Everyone wrote about it, it was on television, it was even on the national news. It genuinely was a marketing phenomenon.

EVAN DAVIS:In 1999, P&G sold over 200 million bottles of Sunny Delight. People began to ask if it could knock a certain fizzy drink off its sugary throne.

CRAIG MAWDSLEY:Coca-Cola was kind of an unassailable number one, some way ahead of any other drink that was there, but what happened very fast was that all of a sudden Sunny Delight seemed to be hot on its heels.

CRAIG MAWDSLEY:It was very much one of the top ten beverage brands in the UK. Then it became one of the top five, and the idea that Coca-Cola could potentially be toppled as the UK's favourite soft drink took hold.

EVAN DAVIS:Proctor & Gamble it seemed had discovered the impossible. A wholesome drink that children preferred to Coke. Until, well, the food commission urged parents to read the label. It turned out that Sunny Delight wasn't full of great stuff at all. Parents began to ask, "is this really juice?"

KATH DALMENY:It was about 5% juice, which of course means 95% other stuff. And the other stuff, obviously mainly water, but there were things in there like colourings, flavourings, vegetable oil, which is one that gives you a kind of mouth feel of drinking something with a more juicy content.

KATH DALMENY:In the trade it's called organoleptic properties, which sounds terribly posh. There was also quite a lot of sugar.

KATH DALMENY:You couldn't see that from the label, especially if you were a parent trying to read that label, because it was declared as carbohydrate and that's the technical term for sugars in a product. We worked out that that was a roughly equivalent kind of product to a cola. And we wanted to let parents know that.

EVAN DAVIS:Horrified parents began to desert the brand.

ANDREW MARSDEN:It imploded the whole promise and I think there were literally hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of mums up and down the country, suddenly realising that their bubble had burst. This mysterious and magical product was actually not juice.

EVAN DAVIS:Brand managers battle to regain Sunny Delight's healthy glow. But nothing could prepare them for what was about to come. Saatchi & Saatchi had been planning a fun new advert for Christmas.

CRAIG MAWDSLEY:We had taken the same sort of structure that we had on our normal ads, but in this case it wasn't some kids it was a snowman.

EVAN DAVIS:The ad was launched as the school holidays began, but Sunny Delight's makers were about to receive an unwanted Christmas present.

MALE NEWSREADER:The makers of Sunny Delight, one of Britain's top-selling soft drinks, have admitted that too much of it can turn children's skin yellow.

EVAN DAVIS:A young Sunny Delight drinker from Wales had been rushed to hospital, suffering from an unusual temporary side-effect.

DR DUNCAN CAMERON:She was a sweet little girl of around four, and just like any other young girl, except that her skin had a certain colour to it.

EVAN DAVIS:Any parent trying to imagine what shade she'd turned, needed only to watch to the end of the advert.

DR DUNCAN CAMERON:The mother told me that she had worked out that the child was occasionally drinking 1 to 1.5L of Sunny Delight a day.

EVAN DAVIS:By 2001, sales had halved, and Sunny Delight had fallen from near the top of the best-seller list to a lowly number 42.

CRAIG MAWDSLEY:I hung on to it, grim-faced. I was probably hoping that I would be able to come up with some kind of idea that would turn it around. But the sales just kept on going down, and there really wasn't too much we could do.

MARK BORKOWSKI:You can hype anything, you can make everything fantastic, but you can't hype a poor product.

EVAN DAVIS:Canny advertisers know that yes you can fool people for a while and you can enjoy booming sales for a year or two, but you're in business for the long-term and in the long-term you're bound to be rumbled, as Sunny Delight was.

CRAIG MAWDSLEY:It wasn't what they had initially thought it was. A 100% juice product, completely, entirely healthy and sugar-free. Of course, none of those things were ever things that we'd ever claimed about it or ever indeed intended to claim.

MARK BORKOWSKI:You can't dissect and say one thing didn't lead to another, they did.

RITA CLIFTON:Your consumers, or indeed your opinion-formers, will pick up their cues and clues about your brand from a whole range of sources, so where is it in a supermarket, what's the packaging like, or who's advertising it. All these things are important to people's impressions about your brand. And of course you use that power of impressions at your peril.

EVAN DAVIS:Perhaps Sunny Delight was a victim of its own success. The higher our expectations of a product, the further it has to fall in our estimation if it doesn't deliver. And that's especially true of products aimed at children.

CRAIG MAWDSLEY:We had never thought that this was going to be quite so, you know, emblematic for the health of the nation's children. And still I look back on it today and just think, it was just an orange soft drink, wasn't it?

STEPH MCGOVERN:Well no, it wasn't just an orange soft drink. It was also one of the biggest business blunders in recent years, and a lesson in how important it is to have a good reputation.