Epic Marketing Failures

Sometimes a marketing strategy can do wonders for a business and help increase your market share. In other cases it can severely harm your company’s reputation, and even cause you to file for bankruptcy. These are just a few examples of spectacular marketing failures:

• Blockbuster Video commits suicide

In 2003, Blockbuster Video announced what they thought would be something revolutionary: no late fees on late returns of DVDs. Most people thought, ‘Great! I’ll return the DVD when I feel like it.’ And so it went that most people never returned them. Those who returned the DVDs after too long were then charged with the entire price of the DVD. As you can imagine, not many people would rent a movie from a place that does idiotic stuff like that.

In the end they filed for bankruptcy and had to close 145 stores. Many expect them to close the remaining 3000 stores shortly.

• KFC gives out free chicken

When a company decides to give out free food, you can be sure that pandemonium will follow. This is exactly what happened in 2009 when KFC made an offer to Oprah show viewers, telling them they could download a free voucher entitling them to a two piece chicken meal with two side orders and a biscuit. When people went to the KFC stores to cash in their vouchers, they were told that they can’t use them. OOPS! This led to mini-riots at many of their stores.

In the end KFC went back on the Oprah show to apologize and make right on their promise. In the end 10.5 million vouchers were downloaded and KFC ended up losing $42 million ( roughly R330 million) worth of chicken, without the slightest bit of good publicity.

You must be some special kind of stupid to start handing out your product for free.

• Cops say ‘Zune sucks’

Apparently police officers don’t like Microsoft’s Zune MP3 player. This became quickly apparent when a Microsoft employee got arrested for putting up posters advertising the product at a music festival in Austin, Texas.

Apparently the arresting officer said “We’ll have none of your advertising for your DRMed, cripplewared crappy MP3 player littering our town.” Ouch!

• Pepsi brings back the dead

As Pepsi sought to gain a larger market share by appealing to the younger generation, they came up with the cool slogan “Come Alive! You’re the Pepsi Generation.” This led to them expanding their product into the Asian market.

An effort to translate their slogan from “Come Alive with Pepsi” to Mandarin proved to be disastrous. They wrongly translated it to “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.”

In the end they had to remove the slogan from the Asian market, for very obvious reasons.

• The Chevrolet ‘ It Doesn’t Go’

When Chevrolet introduced the ‘Nova’ in Latin America they were perplexed at why it didn’t sell. That was until they found out that Nova (no va) in Spanish means ‘It doesn’t go’.

Chevrolet quickly changed this by rebranding the car as the Corcel which means ‘horse’. But the damage was already done.

All these examples have served notice to the importance of employing a competent marketing team that can take your business to new heights and help you achieve your goals. Unfortunately, they won’t be able to bring you ancestors back from the grave.

(This is a post by our intern Kristian Meijer)

(Image by elle brown, CC by 2.0, via Flickr)

 

Tags: marketing, marketing disasters