GREAT • What causes some marketing campaigns to go spectacularly wrong? “ An engaging read and a valuable lesson for marketers” Jim Coleman, Managing Partner, We Are Social • Why might new product launches, publicity stunts or rebranding exercises be doomed to failure? • How can you prevent a social media backlash spiralling out of control? BRAN • When should you apologise, cut your losses, make a U-turn? By turns insightful, funny and practical, Great Brand Blunders examines over 150 marketing disasters from across the globe – many featuring household name brands such as Apple, Virgin, Coca Cola and D McDonald’s – and treats each one as an amazing learning opportunity. GREAT BLUNDERS With a particular focus on 21st century calamities, from Apple Maps to Bic for Her to the #QantasLuxury fi asco, Rob Gray pinpoints what went wrong in each case and highlights the crucial lessons to be learned from these misjudgements. He also covers classic brand blunders, such as New Coke and the Hoover free fl ights debacle, and provides some inspiring examples of marketing as it should be done. Great Brand Blunders is required reading not only for professional marketers, academics and students, but for anyone interested in the testing challenges that lie behind the BRAND polished brand images marketers hope to present to the public. Rob Gray has done us a service. This book is overdue. For too long our craft has tried“ to hide its mistakes: you will be amazed and yes, even amused by just how dumb some campaigns have been. Great Brand Blunders allows us to learn lessons ROB GRAY BLUNDERS The Worst Marketing and Social from the unspoken f-word: failure.” Richard Linning, Former President, IPRA Media Meltdowns of All Time… and How to Avoid Your Own Rob Gray is a journalist, copywriter and brand consultant who has been writing about brands and marketing for over £12.99 two decades for publications such as the Marketer, the $19.99 Financial Times, the Guardian, PR Week and Campaign. @CrimsonBizBooks /crimsonbiz www.facebook.com/CrimsonBusinessBooks ROB GRAY Great Brand Blunders - final spread - v5 OUTLINED 1 08/01/2014 11:49 Contents About the author ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Awful advertising 5 The worst campaigns in history Chapter 2 What’s the deal? 25 Out- of- control promotions Chapter 3 Provoking a social media backlash 45 Indiscreet tweets, Facebook foul- ups and hashtag horror stories Chapter 4 When NPD stands for New Product Disaster 79 Dismal launches, from the overhyped to the underwhelming Chapter 5 Stupid stunts 99 Lethal imbecility and chaos on the streets in the quest to grab attention Chapter 6 Regrettable rebranding 113 Marketing makeovers that made it worse Chapter 7 Can you believe it? 133 When fakery, falsification and scams come to light Chapter 8 Wide of the mark 155 Patronised consumers, mistargeted products and inharmonious partnerships Chapter 9 Baffling brand extensions 173 Daft stretches and crazy category hops 4275.indd 5 27/12/13 7:43 AM Great Brand Blunders Chapter 10 Lost in translation 187 Causing cross- cultural confusion and international offence Chapter 11 Unwise refinement and marketing U- turns 205 Strategic fiascos, ill- fated tinkering and terrible reformulations Conclusion The heightened risks of the social media age 227 Acknowledgements 229 Index 231 vi 4275.indd 6 07/01/14 8:22 AM About the author Rob Gray has written about marketing and brands for over two decades. He is a long- standing, regular contributor to the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s magazine The Marketer, and since 2000 he has worked in a freelance capacity as head of editorial content at the International Public Relations Association, where he is responsible for commissioning and editing the highly respected IPRA Thought Leadership series of essays. His insightful journalism on brands, marketing and communications has appeared in a wide variety of publications, from leading newspapers such as the Financial Times and the Guardian to business titles including Marketing, Campaign, Broadcast, PR Week, HR Magazine, The Grocer and Management Today. He also works as a copywriter and marketing consultant. Rob lives with his wife and children in a village on the border of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. He is renowned for the relish with which he winkles out the lessons to be learned from a good blunder. Go to @RobGrayWriter to follow him on Twitter. 4275.indd 7 27/12/13 7:43 AM 4275.indd 8 27/12/13 7:43 AM Introduction It’s said that the best way to learn is through our own mistakes. If that were always true, the incompetent and reckless would be the wisest among us, and lurching ostentatiously from one awful error to another would hold the key to success. Follow such flawed logic to its conclusion and we’d entrust vital assignments to people known to have frequently screwed up. Reassured by that? No, nor me. Better, surely, to keep our own mistakes to a minimum by learning from those made by our rivals and contemporaries, with insight gained from historic disasters thrown in for good measure. Even the greatest brands make a mess of their marketing from time to time. The roll-call in this book includes Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Apple, Starbucks, Virgin, Nestlé, Qantas, Mattel, Sony, Danone, Microsoft, Colgate, Wal- Mart, Bic and many others on the global A- list. I’ve also drawn on plenty of instances of flops and calamities from across the world featuring smaller brands. All told, Great Brand Blunders covers more than 175 examples of marketing misadventures, major and minor, spanning Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Australasia. Yet although the book is predominantly about those occasions when things went awry, I have purposely leavened it with some inspiring examples of getting it majestically right. It doesn’t do to be relentlessly negative. And while there are passages where I may be a trifle acerbic in tone, I have aimed also to be upbeat, balanced and instructive – without, 4275.indd 1 27/12/13 7:43 AM Great Brand Blunders I hope, being preachy. In addition to scrutinising stupid decisions and dissecting cadaverous campaigns, I offer some helpful marketing tips. By marching expectantly down blind alleys, others pinpoint for us directions to rule out. A high proportion of examples in this book are drawn from the last few years. On the one hand, that’s a deliberate effort on my part to be relevant, but on the other it also reflects the fact that more brand blunders than ever are occurring and being magnified because of the phenomenon that is social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. However, no comprehensive book on marketing disasters would be complete without ‘classic’ failures such as the Ford Edsel, New Coke and Hoover’s infamously out-of- control free flights debacle. Through new research and analysis and some first-hand interviews with those involved, I like to think I’ve brought a fresh perspective to bear on such famous fiascos. At the same time, I hope my take on many of the lesser known faux pas that feature on the following pages will be equally entertaining and illuminating, if not more so. Blunders from previous generations provide timeless insights and valuable lessons even today. But at the same time it’s important to acknowledge how much the world has changed. We now live in the age of ‘conversational brands’. While without question interacting with a target audience through social media channels is a good thing, it has made marketing more immediate and infinitely more perilous. In the rush to exploit digital opportunities, a lot of the old checks and balances have been swept away. Sometimes relatively junior team members who ‘get’ social media are left to make decisions that can have huge implications for a brand reputation nurtured over decades. Moreover, the loss of message control that is inherent in social media opens the door to all manner of unintended consequences. Today’s consumers expect their voices to be heard. They are passionate in support of their favourite brands. But they also have a sense of ownership that often manifests itself in holding brands to account. The world isn’t populated by unaware, constantly sunny characters like Forrest Gump or Ned Flanders who see good in everyone, everywhere. Real people have strong opinions and take great pleasure in pointing out shortcomings and faults. And when there’s a bona fide balls-up, they may relish the role 2 4275.indd 2 27/12/13 7:43 AM Introduction they play in criticising the brand that’s to blame, helping bad news spread like wildfire – the nightmarish flipside of a successful viral marketing campaign packed with rigorously pre-agreed messages. Brands that should know better have dropped some terrible social media clangers. Some have opened themselves up to abuse by posting insulting or offensive content – dissing President Obama, joking with young teenagers about hardcore pornography and making light of natural disasters being just a few choice examples of errant behaviour – or by unleashing hashtags that are wildly inappropriate or carelessly present an open invitation to mischief makers. Social media has an insatiable appetite for content, and it is in trying to feed this appetite that brands can come unstuck. Just as marketing itself has many facets, this book considers numerous aspects of failure, from crass ads that are offensive to their target audience (and in one case a campaign so misjudged it drove a brand to extinction) to publicity stunts so ill- conceived and chaotic that they required the intervention of the emergency services, and in a couple of extreme instances even caused the deaths of participants and bystanders.