What is the purpose of a Logo?
April 24th, 2023
What comes to your mind when you think of your fav[...]
While experimenting in marketing, many marketers make mistakes. They try to think out of the box. It fails. They learn. They move on. It is all a part of learning process and many a times we are more likely to do badly before doing well. However, you have to do exceptionally bad to have made examples made out of you about what not to do in marketing. We have compiled a list of such failures below:
1. When Cartoon Network Shut Down Boston
No one can agree about the effectiveness of guerilla marketing but when your guerilla marketing campaign is get confused with a terrorism scare and the police gets involved, you should know that you messed up. That’s what happened to Cartoon Network’s Guerilla marketing campaign in Boston that tried to put up LED signs of a cartoon character that were mistaken as a bomb. This whole fiasco resulted in shutting down of several bridges, transportation lines, and roads. There is a clear lesson here for marketers that you should beware of political situation around you and how it can affect you before launching a campaign like this.
2. Spoilers without A Spoiler’s Alert
Amazon is supposed to know how spoilers work, having a successful e-book reader and all, but it surprised and enraged many fans who mistakenly read spoiler’s on Amazon’s Kindle billboard in Washington D.C that showed the first page of Mockingjay, the third novel in The Hunger Games series, while also giving out spoilers for the first two books.
3. The New York Times Email Blunder
Email marketing can be beneficial if done right. The New York Times decided to lure back those who had unsubscribed by sending out an email and offering a discount. It would have turned out really well if that email wasn’t sent to their whole 8 million large subscriber list. If there was ever an instance of an embarrassing mistakenly-sent email, that was it.
4. Pepsi’s Poor Translation
When Pepsi expanded to China, they wanted to launch with a slogan “Pepsi brings you back to life”. There must have been some mix up in translation because the brand launched with the slogan “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from their graves”. Either this or Pepsi China was extraordinarily special.
Feature Image Courtesy of: http://blog.mindjet.com/
