Tag Archive for: marketing fails

It’s the marketer’s responsibility to come up with creative ways to stand out against the competition. And as we all know, the online community is not a particularly forgiving group – so controversial comments intended to be funny rarely fly. These careless and inadvertent mistakes can often cost the company, literally and figuratively.

Below are examples of when the creativity just plain flopped:

Bud Light really is #UpForWhatever

In 2015, these new slogans appeared on our Bud Light bottles: “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night. The perfect beer for whatever happens. #UpForWhatever.” As you can imagine, the audience did not react well.

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Total Beauty Twitter Mix-up

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Valiant effort to compliment Oprah, except … well… that’s not Oprah. Awkward!

Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg tried to help lessen the media heat on Total Beauty, but a mistake that obvious certainly does not go unnoticed. Whoopi told ET she “could be compared to a lot worse people.” It was more unfortunate that this particular award ceremony was already being criticized for being “too white” and “not diverse”.

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Bic: Maybe just think like a professional

“Look like a girl, Act like a lady, Think like a man, Work like a boss”. Okay, It doesn’t take a lot of explaining to understand why this advertisement was offensive to just about all women on National Woman’s Day. The company did eventually apologize.

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Dave and Busters’ Taco Tweet Disaster
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This tweet was obviously supposed to be funny and promotional but somewhere went horribly wrong. It took Dave and Busters less than an hour to realize that the public reaction was not what they hoped and the company quickly apologized for the comment.

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Promoting your brand may not always be smooth sailing, but the way you handle these situations determines the overall impact on an organization. Many companies are proactively forming diversity or inclusion committees in order to get ahead of potential PR flubs. However if you find yourself in hot water, get a full assessment of the situation, work quickly, and instill confidence in the company in order to solve the problem.