Brands and marketers create more blunders than one would think and contrary to popular belief, these blunders can cause a lot of harm to the brands involved. Sometimes, the marketing, advertising and PR agencies come out unscathed but the brand whose name is on the failed marketing campaigns, can take years to recover. Here are a list of some of the worst and most shocking marketing mistakes made by some of the very loved brands. Poor sense, poor taste, poor judgement, ignorance and laziness can all be blamed for these blunders.
Vodafone takes credit for the Arab Spring
Referring to a highly political and emotional issue in ads is never a wise move. The Arab Spring signified the success that ordinary citizens were about to bring about in Arab countries by overthrowing oppressive military regimes. There was a lot of bloodshed and suffering and Vodafone goes and cheapens the whole movement in their “One Power” marketing campaign. The ads had words like “ We only reminded Egyptians how powerful they are” and implied that Vodafone’s network was basically responsible for the Arab Spring. Needless to say, there was a huge backlash and Vodafone was quick to deny any involvement.
Burger King gets creepy
The fact that the word King is in the name of the brand Burger King could have been marketing so much more effectively. However, marketers decided to go the creepy way and how they ever though that creepy was a good marketing move is beyond logic. the advertisements featured a man waking up to another man dressed as a king followed by some more creepy innuendos. People were so creeped out, that Burger King slipped to the third position in terms of sales.
Snickers promotes homophobia
Snickers is a well loved candy bar that boasts of having a lot of nuts or peanuts in them. For some reason, their marketing team decided to use the slang reference to nuts and basically told people to get some nuts or to grow a pair with Snickers. Their overly macho approach to the slogan included featuring Mr. T in the ads who is shown chasing after an effeminate male speed-walker and hitting him with Snickers bars while telling him that he is “a disgrace to man race”. Gay rights groups immediately pounced on the ads claiming that it promoted homophobia and discrimination.
The Gap becomes unrecognizable
Gap is a very popular clothing chain and has a very recognizable log with “GAP” written in white over a blue background. However, the brand decided it was time to update the logo. By changing the logo, the brand become unrecognizable and lost its uniqueness. It also resulted in customers and fans sending in complaints by the droves and the company seeing a dip in sales. Thankfully, the brand quickly went back to the old logo.
Panasonic inadvertently goes dirty
Japanese electronics giant Panasonic used to have some of the most innovative products on the market in the 1990s. In fact, the company had already developed a touchscreen PC in 1996. They decided to market the product aggressively in the US using a mascot called Woody. Things went south when they decided to name the touchscreen feature “Touch Woody” not knowing that wood has a very dirty slang meaning in the US. They went even further by using the slogan – “Touch Woody – the Internet Pecker”, referring to numerous sexual connotations in the process. As a result of these mistakes, its highly innovative product was a failure and the campaign became infamous.
Netflix disses its core business
Netflix became a household name as a business that delivered DVDs via mail. People could choose from a huge database of movies and they would be sent a DVD by mail in a few days. The company suddenly decided to offer digital downloads and rename its DVD shipping business Quickster. Customers dropped out in droves and the market cap of the company went from $16 billion to $4 billion in a year.
Xerox does not like being popular
Sometimes companies become so popular, that their names become verbs and a part of the modern English dictionary. Take for example Google, which now refers to the act of searching for something using the popular search engine. Before Google, Xerox was a highly popular company producing excellent photocopying equipment. People started using the word Xerox to refer to photocopying and the term became widely used worldwide. However, Xerox did not like being a household name and phenomenon and tried very hard to get people to use photocopying instead of Xerox!