What’s in this article:
- From Burger King to Netflix, we discuss brand’s marketing blunders and what went wrong.
Sometimes your marketing campaigns don’t go according to plan. Maybe the timing was wrong or a social media post lacked context. In many cases, these mishaps had good intentions, but that’s not always enough. These gaffes can result in missed sales opportunities, bad press, and a desperate scramble to publicly apologize — in other words, a day of putting out fires on the marketing team.
Luckily, we can learn from others’ mistakes. We’ve rounded up some recent examples of brand marketing blunders and how they could have gone a little better.
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Burger King misses the mark on International Women’s Day
When Burger King launched a new marketing campaign on International Women’s Day 2021, it wanted to highlight gender inequality in professional kitchens while promoting its own initiative to grant culinary scholarships to underrepresented Burger King employees. Unfortunately, it did so with the fateful words “Women belong in the kitchen.”
Some of these ads ran in print where this bold headline appeared on the same page as a lengthy explanation. Unfortunately, Burger King also tweeted out that statement unaccompanied by any additional context. The backlash was instant and intense, leading the burger chain to eventually delete it and apologize (after a few hours of doubling down).
How to fix it: It doesn’t matter that Burger King followed up that first tweet with a clarifying thread; that initial statement could still be retweeted and shared by itself. The house of the Whopper could have avoided a massive headache by attaching a graphic to the first post that illustrated its point, rather than trying to grab attention by making a controversial statement.
Warner Bros. launches “insensitive and inappropriate” Pride promotion
Video games have historically been overwhelmingly heteronormative so it’s encouraging to see major publishers celebrate diversity and LGBTQIA+ representation in more recent years. This is exactly what Warner Bros. Games attempted to do during Pride 2021: highlight a canonically bisexual character from the DC Universe in the mobile version of Injustice 2. There’s just one problem — Injustice 2 is a fighting game.
For its “Global Challenge with Pride,” Warner Bros. Games encouraged players to “take down” Poison Ivy. Promo images boasted that the queer character had been defeated 175,000 times before the backlash started. The premise of ‘beating up Poison Ivy’— a (fictional) member of a community that often faces real-life violence—faced instant criticism.
How to fix it: It’s unrealistic to expect Warner Bros. to make significant changes to Injustice 2’s gameplay, but there are plenty of other ways to celebrate LGBTQIA+ representation. WB shifted gears to a Champion Bundle that allowed players to unlock other LGBTQIA+ characters, which would have been a more positive way to celebrate Pride.
Netflix and USA Today make fake news a front-page event
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, legitimate news sources have contended with widespread misinformation and disinformation, making it difficult for audiences to know what to believe. It’s this unusual timing that made Netflix’s ad for new series Sweet Tooth a missed opportunity — and it didn’t help that USA Today printed the fake news on its front page.
Here’s what happened: Netflix created what appeared to be a legitimate newspaper article about the birth of hybrid human-animal babies throughout the United States, which is the plot of the new series. The word “advertisement” appeared in very small print above the headline, but otherwise, the ad looked like a standard front-page USA Today article. It might’ve shown positive results if not for the timing and placement.
How to fix it: In this case, USA Today deserves the brunt of the blame. Netflix should have made it more clear that the “article” was actually an ad, perhaps with in-universe newspaper branding, but the publication shouldn’t have violated its own advertising guidelines to put this story on its front page with the bare minimum disclosure.
Apologies go a long way, but the best way to fix marketing gaffes is to consider your ads and organic marketing efforts from all angles, including whether or not they could be easily taken out of context. Be flexible enough to take current events into account, because timing is everything. Learn from the mistakes these brands made and you’ll be in a better position to launch a drama-free marketing campaign.