The Lessons That Can Be Learned From Notable Failed Marketing Campaigns
The secret to successful marketing is partly the result of immense creativity, partly the result of seizing the right opportunity at the right time and partly about knowing exactly how much risk you are willing to take with a campaign. In some respects, if you can afford to take risks, there is immense value in learning from failure. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés put it so succinctly, “failure is a greater teacher than success.” Because of this, you often find marketing campaigns that appear to be playing with house money; companies take tremendous risks to reap the rewards of greater success, with the main consequence of failure being a lesson learned. Here are some failed marketing campaigns that have crucial lessons we can all learn from, especially the company that made the mistake.
Hoover’s Fiasco Of Free Flights
The early 1990s were not a good year for vacuum cleaner pioneers the Hoover Company, as a global stock market crash caused the company to struggle to sell their expensive vacuum cleaners in the face of increasingly technologically advanced competitors such as Dyson. Their way around this was to offer two flights to the United States, at a value on average of around £600 as the time, to anyone who spent at least £100 on Hoover products, subject to the rather deliberately obtuse application process.
However, the campaign was far too successful, and a lot of customers gleefully bought the cheapest Hoover vacuum cleaners available that qualified for the promotion, with over 300,000 applications in total. Facing a cataclysmic loss, Hoover pulled the deal, leading to a lengthy class-action lawsuit, which culminated in the company losing its Royal Warrant and its sale to Italian vacuum cleaner company Candy. Ultimately, failure to deliver on a promise can cost a business everything so it is better to overdeliver than to overpromise.
The Tragic Irony Of A Nike Endorsement
In 2011, the most famous Paralympian in the world was Oscar Pistorius. Known as the Blade Runner, Mr Pistorius was a central part of a Nike sponsorship deal, with a huge marketing campaign led by the slogan “I Am The Bullet In The Chamber”. There was a tragic, morbid irony to this when in 2013 he was arrested after he shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, for which he would be found guilty of culpable homicide, then later for murder, receiving a 15-year prison sentence.
Nike apologised and pulled their advertising, the only action they could take in the wake of Mr Pistorius’ actions. This highlights the importance of knowing who you are working with when making deals with influencer marketers to avoid the impact of negative reception.
Gap’s Weak Week-Long Logo Change
The Gap’s logo is one of the most notable, widely reviled, expensive and rapidly reversed branding failures of the past 15 years. The intention was simply to refresh a brand that had become relatively stagnant, but the use of a gradient box and a thick sans-serif font compared to the previous logo immediately turned off people who saw it as a logo change for the sake of it. It did not represent a logo for a stylish fashion company, and much like Tropicana’s failed rebrand would quickly see itself reversed. The lesson learned here is that Gap has a good logo already, one that they would slightly adjust in 2016 to make more versatile, and in some cases, the best branding move is to avoid a radical change.
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