Dumb brand marketing mistakes
The longer I’m in this field, the more I shake my head in disbelief at huge brand mistakes. These mistakes cost companies tens of millions of dollars, but we here who is directly accountable. These marketing errors would be a great case study in an MBA marketing class.
1ne: Jeep marketing a vehicle that costs $95,000+
When I read about the price of the new Jeep Wagoneer, I said the same thing that many people are saying “Yeah, right, $100,000 for a Jeep”. It turns out that many people agreed with me when I posted that comment in response to a Wagoneer Twitter ad. Even auto-review sites say the same thing. Car and Driver said, “Road-hogging dimensions, clumsy handling, dizzying starting price for a Jeep”.
This is an excellent study of brand positioning. Jeep is noted for marketing rugged vehicles that can go through ice, snow, and off-road on some models. For the amount of money someone would spend on the new Jeep Wagoneer, they could have Porsche SUV or a very nice Mercedes or BMW SUV.
What dunce within the company could have thought people would plunk down $100k for a Jeep?
2wo: Coca-Cola Creations
According to the Creative Blog, “A few months ago Coke launched its new series of flavors called “Coca-Cola Creations” which included variations of the soft drink such as ‘Starlight’ Byte’ and musician Marshmello’s strawberry and watermelon coke. But its new ‘Dreamworld’ flavor might be the cherry on the peculiar Coke cake. While we are all for an out-there marketing campaign, there is something so odd about having an entire drinks campaign around flavors that simply don’t exist, right? This isn’t the first weird campaign we’ve seen, to celebrate our 10th anniversary, we looked back on the most controversial ad campaigns of 2013 “.
Now they have come out with a flavor called “Dreamworld”? What in the hell are they thinking? The only buzz I’m seeing on social media is people asking, “WTF?”. They also have a marshmallow flavor and have started adding coffee to their sodas.
In case you didn’t know, people are drinking less soda because of its health issues.
3hree: Meta caught injecting code into websites?
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been rewriting websites its users visit, letting the company follow them across the web after they click links in its apps, according to new research from an ex-Google engineer.
The two apps have been taking advantage of the fact that users who click on links are taken to webpages in an “in-app browser,” controlled by Facebook or Instagram, rather than sent to the user’s web browser of choice as Safari or Firefox.
Meta said that injecting a tracking code obeyed users’ preferences on whether or not they allowed apps to follow them and that it was only used to aggregate data before being applied for targeted advertising or measurement purposes for those users who opted out of such tracking.
This makes what? Lie number…
No wonder there are so many bad brands out there, and the CMOS have the shortest tenure of any executives.
Originally published at https://www.newmediaandmarketing.com on August 12, 2022.
