A Look Back at Marketing ‘Fails’ in 2011

  

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2011 saw a lot of marketing campaigns spectacularly ‘fail’ for what seem now, obvious reasons, but as the man said, if we don’t learn from the past, we are apt to repeat it in the future.

Sure, there were brand ‘suicides’ committed by Charlie Sheen, Herman Cain and Anthony Weiner, but what about the just dumb marketing mistakes that were committed? 

Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:

• Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Last year, a New Jersey chapter of MADD held a benefit to raise money by conducting a beer pong tournament.  Although their heart may have been in the right place, think of the public perception of such an event – it seems to go directly against MADD’s objectives.  It would ‘fit’ as well as awarding winners with cigarettes at a Cancer Society event or awarding a fur coat at a PETA meeting.
•  Qwikster.  One of the best fails of the year!  In essence, on September 18^th of last year, Qwikster divided Netflix so that if you wanted streaming DVDs, as well as DVD rentals, you had to maintain two accounts - something that subscribers found confusing and upsetting.  Netflix expected some of its 23 million subscribers to cancel the service due to the price increase, but the cancellation rate greatly exceeded their customer loss projections.  Then, on October 10^th, Netflix subscribers got an email telling them that Netflix had come to the conclusion that Qwikster was a mistake and would be immediately withdrawn.
•  Verizon Wireless.  The communications company found itself in a similar situation to Qwikster in that in one week, the company announced that it would add a $2 fee for one-time phone and online payments. People raised an immediate ruckus and Verizon rescinded the decision the next day.  A similar ‘fail’ happened when the Bank of America and Wells Fargo announced that they would begin to charge fees to use their debit cards, then rescinded that decision due to their customers’ very vocal objections 
• Delta Airlines.  Although not a ‘fail’, we still wonder if they conducted any research on a new slogan they unveiled last year - "Delta.  Keep Climbing."  For an airline, that would seem to be a ‘given’, considering the alternative. 
• Groupon.  Groupon started the year off with a monumental gaffe during last year’s Super Bowl.  They aired a couple of commercials which initially seemed to be cause marketing to help some of the world’s trouble spots.  The most memorable one appeared to be a heartfelt plea highlighting the upheaval and exile the Tibetan people have been enduring for decades – then suddenly veered into a commercial extolling the joys of getting 50 percent off fish curry using Groupon.  Insensitive or just plain stupid?  Ask the geniuses at Crispin, Porter that came up with the idea.  Fortunately, it was a short-lived campaign.     
• Abercrombie & Fitch.  What were they thinking?  A press release announced that A&F was offering the cast of JERSEY SHORE money not to wear their clothing since it projected the ‘wrong image’.  Immediately, the cast fired back that they had not been made that offer by A&F.  Quite the opposite – A&F had already produced shirts that bore the words of some of the cast’s catch phrases.  One of the cast members – Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino – filed a $4 million lawsuit against A&F alleging that the clothing company had made false promises to pay Sorrentino not to wear their clothes after the company profited from tee shirts they produced, including one that was emblazoned, ‘The Fitchuation’.

And companies weren’t the only ones that left us scratching our heads.

Penn State, on the heels of the firing of Joe Paterno, saw its students rise en masse to protest the firing before knowing the sexual abuse that had happened during his years there. 

Celebrities weren’t immune either since Ashton Kushner’s ill-timed, and ill-informed, vehement Twitter response immediately after Paterno’s firing caused him to close his account and then turn his Twitter account over to an editor.  Similarly, Gilbert Gottfried lost his job as the ‘spokesduck’ for AFLAC when he twitted an insensitive joke on the heels of the Japanese tsunami. 

All we can hope is that in the coming year, companies will take the time to research some of their ‘brilliant’ marketing ideas before letting them loose on the public.  Once silent, ‘the general public’, with its ability to immediately respond positively or negatively to such actions via social media, can become very vocal, very fast.

Need I add that a lot of these ‘fails’ could have been avoided if the right type of brand research had been conducted?  I would hope that at least the worst offenders now conduct at least practical, if not regular, brand research so that they know how customers and the general public will react before the launch a campaign guaranteed to ‘fail’.