What Impact Does A Bad Marketing Campaign Have On A Brand?

If a brand is formed from the beliefs, values and visions of your company and the products and services it provides, then marketing provides the oxygen for your brand to breathe and reach the wider world.

We are deeply passionate about marketing and work closely with you to ensure that your campaigns speak to your audience and align with their values during a time when understanding and being understood are more important than ever before.

Conversely, the impact of a marketing campaign that misses the mark, insults the target audience or is terribly executed can be significant, and to understand how, here are some notable marketing campaigns of all shapes and sizes that went poorly and how they affected a brand.

How Much Can You Joke With Your Audience In Marketing?

In an age of social media, many brands engage in a dialogue with their audience, but this personal tone means that certain jokes, comments and messages in advertising may be published that would in other circumstances be inappropriate.

The surreal marketing stunts of companies such as KFC and Wendy’s quick-witted roasts of customers and competitors alike on social media strongly engaged their core audience but also helped garner mainstream attention that helped the brand’s identity feel more modern.

However, much like how everyone has a limit to what they can take a joke about, you need to understand what is off-limits and what might be inadvertently taken seriously. An infamous example of this going wrong is with Schlitz Beer.

A bizarre series of ads dubbed “Drink Schlitz or I’ll Kill You” by critics was not treated as lighthearted jokes and expressions of brand loyalty but as outright threats, and this put off customers to such a degree that the company no longer exists.

Is It Always A Good Idea To Modernise Your Brand Identity?

A regular conversation being had in marketing is about modernising brands and ensuring that they are suitable for the wide-reaching scope of modern multi-channel marketing campaigns.

Usually, this means making subtle changes to make a logo easy to spot and easy to modify for multiple campaigns, but it is important to understand what made your old logo work as well.

An infamous example of this was Gap, a clothing brand that was hugely popular in the 1990s, but by 2010 they made the sudden decision to change its brand’s logo in an attempt to modernise the whole brand.

It did not work at all, and within six days, the expensive rebranding was reversed, although Gap took years to recover from the incident.

Conversely, Cuban rum manufacturer Bacardi went the opposite route, reverting to a very classic-looking and highly detailed version of their bat logo in 2013.

How Big Should Your Marketing Claims Be?

Ultimately, the worst case scenario for any marketing campaign, one that can cause serious damage to your company’s reputation and prospects, is to overpromise and underdeliver.

There are a lot of examples of this, but probably the most infamous is the identity protection and digital security company LifeLock, whose CEO, Todd Davis, was so confident in the abilities of their service that he published his Social Security number.

To the surprise of nobody, Mr Davis’ identity was stolen no fewer than 13 times, and the company was fined by the Federal Trade Commission for false advertising.