Exploring The Causes Behind Marketing Campaign Backfires
The world of marketing is a fascinating world of extremes. As the aim of any marketing agency is to ensure their client’s campaign gets noticed, sometimes this leads to novel, bold and occasionally controversial strategies being employed. Done right, daring marketing campaigns grab the attention of a captive audience and make them exceptionally excited to engage with a product or service. However, as with any other daring escapade, there can sometimes be an element of calculated risk to it. Here are some examples of when marketing campaigns backfired on the companies involved, the damage done and what could have been done to stop it.
Electronic Arts Becomes An Arms Dealer
The huge monolithic video game company Electronic Arts is mostly known for forcing the creation of laws based on their predatory monetisation tactics. However, they have also courted controversy and even broken the law in the name of generating pre-release marketing hype. There was the advert for Dead Space 2 made up entirely of mothers looking on disapprovingly, as well as the time EA made a fake protest for their edgy reimagining of Dante’s Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy reimagined as a gory action game. However, probably the worst marketing campaign they did was to promote The Godfather II in 2009, during which they sent out pairs of knuckledusters to journalists as a promotional collector's item. The problem is that in many countries and regions, including the United Kingdom, brass knuckles are illegal to own, making EA an illegal arms dealer, at least until they quickly asked for their return.
Sega Saturn Is Out There, Regrets It Ten Minutes Later
It is probably easier to list the ways in which Sega correctly marketed their products in 1995, but by far the most damaging campaign they ever did was the ostensibly innocuous “It’s Out There” trailer. Fearing the potential of Sony’s rivalling Playstation system, Sega decided to abandon its highly publicised "Saturnday" launch date and immediately bring the console to North America four months earlier than planned. This managed to get them around ten minutes of plaudits before Sony with three simple words ended any possible console war before it could begin, by pricing the console $100 less than the competition. The four-month headstart sold around 50,000 Sega Saturns but at the expense of rushing the hardware, upsetting the stores that did not get early access to the console and upsetting many of their game developers, some of which would vow never to work with Sega again.
New Coke
The reformulation of Coca-Cola is one of the most infamous marketing blunders in history, to the point that some believe it to be a deliberate campaign to spur interest in Coca-Cola’s classic formulation, although that has always been denied. The short version of the tale is that Coca-Cola at one point believed that their only way to compete with Pepsi’s youth-orientated image is to change the formula of their drinks to appeal more to Pepsi drinkers. After just 74 days, the backlash was so strong that the company was forced to reverse direction, which ironically became a highly successful marketing campaign, proving that great outcomes can come from really bad decisions.