Four of the worst marketing mistakes you can make

There’s no black and white rule book in marketing and this means it’s an industry ripe for some huge gaffs.  With every supposed error in marketing is the other voice, reminding us that at least this “epic fail” has got our attention. The old adage that all publicity is good publicity is often jumped on by marketers when things go wrong, but let’s be honest, no one wants to spend time on a marketing strategy to see it blow up in their faces.  If you don’t fancy having to explain to PR why you put up that controversial tweet then take a look at these four real world examples of terrible marketing mistakes.

Twitter fails

The wonderful world of twitter is saturated with gaffs from celebrities and tweets sparking legal action, and it’s also got a fair few branding errors to offer.  One of the most common mistakes made by marketers is failing to log out of their company twitter account before posting personal tweets which are in poor taste.  Vodafone managed to cause a lot of offensive when one of its staff accidently tweeted a homophobic tweet from its official account.  Another error is to aim for humour and fall on the side of poor taste. During the Arab spring Kenneth Cole tried to capitalise on #Cairo hashtag by tweeting:

“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumour is they heard our new spring collection it now available online…”

The brand received a torrent of twitter abuse for the rest of the day and later had to apologise.

Misleading the public

You can’t afford to mislead the public in the digital media age and you certainly can’t if you’re advertising technology.  Remember: there will always be a technological whizz kid out there who will catch you out and there will always be countless online platforms on which they can shout about it.  The result: a real failure of a marketing campaign.  Nokia experienced just this with their launch of the Lumia 920.  Their idea was to demonstrate the optical image stabilization (OIS) feature on the video camera of the phone, but instead they took a video with a professional camera and claimed it was OIS.  What tripped them up?  Not some technical wizardry, simply a blog spotting the reflection of the camera crew in the video.  It’s a really bad idea to lie in an advert, someone will catch you out and it will make your brand look foolish.

Letting technology get ahead of you

The rise of internet marketing has spawned a few clever advertising tools.  Clothing company Express decided to use “in-image advertising” to offer users the opportunity to buy clothes similar to those in photos on Yahoo News stories.  Of course, what they didn’t think about was that photos accompanying the news aren’t always complemented by a bit of fashion advice on the side.  The ad ended up offering users the chance to “get the look” of an Afghan militant.  This is an example of when automated advertising can get the better of marketers.  Remember to understand exactly what your tools will do before you let them loose on the internet!

There’s no heading for this one, just don’t do it

It’s tricky to capture exactly what mistake BBH Labs made with their marketing strategy in this one gimmick.  In order to promote its Wi-Fi, BBH labs came up with the idea of “homeless hot spots”.  Real life homeless people were paid $2.50 an hour to wear t-shirts announcing themselves as a ‘4G hotspot’ and carry around mobile Wi-Fi devices.  As Wired put it the idea sounds like something “out of a darkly satirical science fiction dsytopia”.  It certainly got people talking, but it’s an extremely risky tactic to use just to get your name out there.

View All Blog Posts