As a marketer, you’re trying to help a company grab people’s attention with something clever, memorable, and valuable, or at least a very good deal. But it’s a tough line to walk, and if you’re not good at your job, it can lead to disaster. Here’s a few times it didn’t work out. Maybe the promotion turned out to be too good to be true, maybe the company didn’t think it through, maybe there were loopholes people took advantage of. When things go badly, the company ended up with bad press at best, and more serious problems at worst.
Centennial College can teach you to do better through programs including Advertising and Marketing Communications Management, Advertising- Creative & Digital Strategy, and Advertising Media Management, which feature practical experience, taught by industry experts. Case studies form a part of the program, so you’ll probably be studying failures like these, learning about where they went wrong, and figuring out how to do them better.
Endless free crab legs cost Red Lobster big bucks
Sometimes, there’s such a thing as a promotion that’s just too good. Cracked talks about how in 2003, Red Lobster offered a special promotion: All-you-could-eat Crab Legs. The problem? Crab legs are expensive, and they didn’t think customers would be able to eat more than two plates. By the third plate, they were losing money, and paying customers, since people would pay a flat rate, and literally sit there all day, eating crab legs. In one business quarter alone, they lost three million dollars, and had their CEO step down over the whole incident.
Pepsi jokes about giving away a Harrier jet, gets sued over it
In this case, the promotion was too good to be true, and the company didn’t think its audience would take it seriously. As Today I Found Out tells it, in 1995, Pepsi launched “Drink Pepsi, Get Stuff,” a really simple campaign where you collected points off of every soda you bought, then mailed them in for merchandise like shirts and hats. The problem, this time, was in how it was advertised: A commercial that was clearly meant to be a joke, where a kid collects 7 million Pepsi points to purchase a Harrier jet. However, a 21-year-old business student took it seriously, collected the needed points, then sued them when he couldn’t purchase the jet. The lawsuit was thrown out on the grounds that the commercial was clearly a joke, but it’s still a great example of why most ads have tons of fine print, asterisks, and fast-talking announcers reading the disclaimer.
Also, Pepsi causes riots in the Philippines
This next one’s much worse. In order to make their drink more popular, a special Philippines-only Pepsi promotion called “Number Fever” was unveiled. As Mental Floss explains, customers would look under the bottle caps of Pepsi drinks, searching for a three-digit code. The winning code would receive one million pesos, which comes out to about $40,000 US dollars. In the short-term, the campaign was successful, and the drink’s sales shot up to the point where it was estimated that half of the country took part. The problems came when it was time for the payout. It turns out that the winning number, 349, was printed on more than 800,000 bottle caps. Suddenly, thousands of prize winners came forward, meaning the company owed billions of dollars in prize money that they couldn’t hope to pay. It led to rioting and chaos, and the company paid out $10 million in legal fees before it was all over.
“Make Your Own” Chevy commercials trash the brand
Here, we see an example of what can go wrong when the audience has too much control, as reported by Advertising Age. In 2006, Chevrolet had just re-launched the Tahoe, one of their SUVs, and promoted it with a special “make your own Tahoe commercial” exercise on their website, where anyone could footage the company had filmed of the vehicle, edit it into any order they wanted, and have any words they wanted show up onscreen. Unfortunately, the general public decided to create commercials talking about how SUVs are ruining the environment, calling the Tahoe a poorly-designed vehicle, and other satirical, unfriendly content. While the campaign was eventually pulled, videos from the campaign were shown on their website for several days, to widespread mockery.
American Airlines accidentally lets customers fly for free forever
Here’s another story from Cracked about a promotion that turned out to be too successful. First-class plane tickets are expensive, and in 1981, American Airlines decided to sell a really expensive variety for $250,000, with the promotion that it was the last ticket you’d ever have to buy, because it got you first-class flights for life. They figured the high price tag would scare all but the richest customers off, but the general public realized that simply using the ticket a few dozen times would make the money back. Far more people bought the tickets than intended, and used them way more than anyone expected (one man flew to London and back 16 times a month). Eventually, they discontinued the program when they realized they were losing $1 million a year on it, but some of those tickets are still in use to this very day.
Apple forces users to download a U2 album they don’t want.
You may have heard of this one. In 2014, U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence, was named as an iTunes exclusive, offered for free as part of a promotion, and was placed on many people’s iTunes for free. The problem? It was added to everyone’s iTunes whether or not you wanted it, without warning, and it was difficult to remove, like spam. As Wired explains, the album couldn’t even be deleted for a week, because it showed up as a previous purchase on the iTunes Music Store. The worst bit of publicity came shortly afterwards, when Apple had to release instructions on how to permanently remove the album from your devices, with the first-ever customized deletion tool just for an album.