5 Biggest Marketing Mistakes Ever Made
With the new age of advertising, companies will go through big measure to make themselves stand out. However, for some of them, these ideas ended up being huge blunders that had to be sorted out quickly.
Ungraceful Gap
What company doesn’t try to stay fresh and up-to-date with a trendy new logo. In 2010, Gap attempted stay “current” and released a new logo. How long did they keep it? A full 2 days. After a huge amount of dissent from their customers and the public, Gap realized that sticking to tradition would be the best for their brand.
Slippery Snapple
During the summertime, popsicles tend to melt, right? They usually aren’t big enough to flood the streets of downtown Manhattan, but Snapple was able to make that happen in 2005. Snapple thought it would be a great marketing strategy to break a Guinness world record by creating a 17.5 ton kiwi-strawberry popsicle. It ended up melting in the sun, and the streets of Manhattan were filled with pink water instead of happy consumers.
Cartoon Network Bomb Scare?
Known as the “Boston Mooninite panic,” in 2007, Cartoon Network came up with a marketing campaign where LED signs featuring their character Ignignokt from Aqua Teen Hunger Force around Boston. These LED signs were mistaken to be bombs, and after a phone call from a concerned resident, the Boston Police and Fire department went around the city taking down the advertisements, under the assumption it was a terrorism scare.
“WOW” Frito Lay
First introduced in 1998, Frito Lay tried to get ahead of the game by introducing their fat- free Lay’s “WOW” Chips. While these chips were free from fat, they came with olestra. Olestra, their substitute for fat, came with severe abdominal cramps and diarrhea. The sales went down by 50% in two years, because in this case it seems that the costs outweighed the benefits.
Budweiser Blunder
Budweiser is known for their good marketing campaigns, look at the past Superbowl ads featuring puppies that could win over anyone’s heart. However, in 2015 they launched their new #UpForWhatever campaign, that essentially had the slogan “the perfect beer to removing “no” from your vocabulary for the night.” This went directly against a strong anti-rape campaign of, “no means no.” Budweiser, receiving backlash from the public quickly apologized and took the label off the market
