In one of the most entertaining reads so far this year, BNet has published its top 77 Worst Business Blunders of the Year. Looking back over 2009, they picked out some doozies. I spent darned-near an hour, lost in capitalistic craziness. Here are some of our favorite marketing strategies gone awry. There are so many good ones, I’m having to publish some this week, and some next (so you’ll have something to look forward to).

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Don’t worry, it’ll be fine: Nobody listens to Oprah anyway.

KFC promotes its new Kentucky Grilled Chicken by having Oprah Winfrey tout a coupon for a free meal on her show. The promotion goes the way you’d expect anything mentioned on Oprah to go: Viewers run to their computers, download more than 10 million coupons, and head to KFC in droves. Mobbed stores run out of chicken and turn customers away empty-handed, leading Advertising Age to call the promotion “one of the all-time blunders” and company president Roger Eaton to post a mea culpa video on YouTube.

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Buy the bloody car, you git, or I’ll smash your sodding skull!

In September, Toyota and its ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, are sued for $10 million by a Los Angeles woman who says she was terrorized by a Web campaign for the Toyota Matrix. A video promoting the campaign features a group of “maniacs” and offers people the chance to “prank” a friend: “It’s easy. Tell us a little about them, then pick one of our maniacs to mess with their heads — through personalized texts, email, calls, video — for 5 straight days.” The woman, Amber Duick, says she received a series of e-mails from “Sebastian,” a British soccer hooligan on the run from police who planned to “hide out” at her house with his pit bull. Duick claims the “terror marketing campaign” left her “constantly in tears and shaking and sobbing in emotional distress,” unable to eat, work, or sleep.

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World peace. Cure for cancer. Left-handed underpants.

“Switching the opening from vertical to horizontal may sound like a small step, but it’s the major breakthrough that many have been waiting for.” — Rob Faucherand, spokesman for British department-store chain Debenhams, on the debut of a new line of tighty-whiteys designed to make life at the urinal easier for southpaws. Faucherand goes on to call the briefs “a vital step toward equality,” given that, heretofore, “left-handed men have to reach much further into their pants.”

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Just Do It?

Thanks to a late-night car wreck and subsequent revelations of marital infidelity, Tiger Woods brand manager Tiger Woods manages to irreparably tarnish the Tiger Woods brand. He is dropped as a pitchman by Accenture and AT&T, and a study by two economics professors at the University of California–Davis estimates that shareholders of companies that sponsor the golfer will lose as much as $12 billion as the result of his confessed “transgressions.”

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Well, hope you learned a thing or two. Come back next Friday for the scary continuation of what NOT to do in marketing.

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Friday, February 5th, 2010, 1:38 pm   |   Advertising, Marketing Best Practices  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback