It’s said that ghosts have unfinished business: haunting the living until a wrong is corrected. Exorcise the marketing mistakes haunting you by learning from them.
Halloween is my all-time favourite holiday of the year. I love the fact you get to dress up and become whoever you want to be on that day.
Halloween is also the perfect time to reflect on the ghosts that haunt your marketing efforts – those mistakes that linger, reminding you of past missteps.
Everyone is human. It’s okay to make a mistake. We’ve all made them; whether it’s targeting the wrong audience, launching a product or service before it’s ready, or failing to ignore the data from the research you’ve done.
No one enjoys admitting when they’re wrong. But denial about your mistakes can only lead to repetition.
So close the curtains and pull your chair a little closer. It’s time to share a few genuine horror stories of monstrous marketing mistakes – and the lessons we can take from them.
“Boo!”: Scaring away your audience
Customers are the most valuable asset of any business. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling if no one wants to buy it.
The X (Twitter) rebranding debacle (2023)
Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to X caused confusion, alienated long-time users and led to a drop in brand equity.
Instead of the friendly bird and cool blues, the new brand was black, dark and unknowable (what does X mean?). Chaos reigned.
Even today, many journalists still feel the need to clarify X as the former Twitter when writing about the platform, reinforcing that the former brand is still far more recognisable than the new one.
Whatever Musk intended by the change, for many users it was a clear message that the platform was no longer the Twitter experience they originally signed up for. At the time, analysts predicted the change could see the company lose billions of dollars in brand value. Meanwhile, the platform has shed nearly a quarter of its user base since the Musk takeover.
Lesson: Rebranding needs careful execution and clear messaging to avoid alienating core users. “It looks cool” isn’t a good enough excuse.
“It’s alive!” Product launches that should have stayed in the lab
Launching any new product or feature comes with a degree of risk. Focus groups and customer data might reveal only so much about what your audience really wants. And that’s assuming you translate and prioritise those findings correctly to come up with the right solution.
Spotify’s AI DJ backlash (2023)
Just because you can use AI to do some incredible things doesn’t always mean you should.
On the surface, Spotify’s launch of an AI-powered DJ feature seemed like a reasonable response to a common user frustration. When listening to Spotify, sometimes you want to know what song is playing – and your device might not be close to hand.
Back in the days when radio was still king, a listener would simply wait for the DJ to back-announce the track. So why not create an AI-powered DJ to do the same thing?
In reality, listeners found Spotify’s AI DJ too generic and impersonal, with Wired writing that “Spotify’s AI DJ has no soul”.
Lesson: The personal touch is still important, even in AI-driven experiences, to avoid missing the point. Plus any new feature may need a few phases of rapid iteration if the initial feedback highlights potential issues.
Meta’s Threads launch struggles (2023)
Threads was Meta’s attempt to capitalise on the exodus of users from rival X (Twitter). Launched in July 2023, Threads saw 30,000 downloads of the app in just 16 hours – taking the record for fastest growing app from ChatGPT.
However, this initial excitement fizzled out quickly. By the end of July, users had plummeted by 80% to 8 million active users per day. One of the reasons cited for the rapid decline was a lack of features people had come to expect from similar sites like X – including direct messaging.
More recently, Threads has struggled to attract content creators and influencers to the platform, an increasingly important group of users in the battle for social media stickability.
Lesson: Building hype without substance can backfire. A rush to launch can become a missed opportunity if the result doesn’t match expectations. Continuous product development is crucial for long-term success.
“Stay back!”: Chilling campaigns that turned on their brands
Some marketing mistakes are so severe they go viral – for all the wrong reasons. And once social media gets hold of them, it’s easy to lose control of the narrative. A key factor that makes these mistakes particularly damaging is how quickly they spiral out of control.
When a marketing misstep catches fire, it can spread like wildfire, magnifying the fallout. Whether it’s poor messaging, tone-deaf campaigns, or viral trends that go awry, these mistakes often highlight a lack of preparation or misjudgment of public sentiment.
McDonald’s Grimace shake meme goes viral (2023)
Last year, McDonald’s released a purple berry-flavoured Grimace shake for a limited-time promotion. And that should have been that. It’s a milkshake celebrating a classic McDonald’s character.
But social media is an unpredictable place. One person makes a joke, another person shares it, someone else creates their own version … and suddenly you have a meme spreading virally across the internet.
However, the #GrimaceShake trend was darker than most, as people began posting videos of themselves buying the shake and subsequently meeting a terrible fate. These videos spread quickly, putting a very different spin on what McDonald’s presumably expected to be just another limited time promotion.
Lesson: While every marketer wishes for a campaign to go viral, once released into social media your carefully crafted message can evolve into something far beyond your control if not carefully managed.
Peloton’s tone-deaf ad
In 2019, Peloton released an ad familiarly known as “Peloton wife” which was widely condemned as sexist and dystopian. The ad featured a husband giving his wife a Peloton for Christmas, which many viewers took to infer that he thought the already slim and attractive woman needed to lose weight. The social media response was scathing, particularly for its gender stereotyping.
At the time, the company defended the ad, even suggesting that the publicity may still boost Christmas sales. In reality, the brand shed $942 million in market value as its stock plunged 9%..
Lesson: Context is everything. While an advert or campaign might play well internally with stakeholders, consider how all segments of the wider community might receive and perceive your message. Always be constantly aware of and sensitive to cultural trends and attitudes.
Overcoming fear of failure
Fear of failure can hold businesses back from trying new strategies or experimenting with bold ideas. But as any good horror story teaches us, sometimes you have to face your fears head-on.
Take Disney’s pricing strategy. In 2023, the House of Mouse faced a backlash for a series of steep price hikes at its theme parks. Disney quickly learned that alienating its core customer base wasn’t worth the potential profits and reversed course, showing that even the biggest brands can acknowledge and learn from their mistakes.
Consumers are usually quite forgiving of brands that own their mistakes and move quickly to rectify an issue. Brands that refuse to admit or correct their mistakes not only risk increasing the potential fallout but also miss out on opportunities for innovation and growth.
Lesson: Embrace failure as a natural part of the marketing process. It’s not about never making mistakes – it’s about learning from them and adapting quickly.
Tricks to avoid becoming the next horror story
While it’s easy to see where these brands went wrong in retrospect, potential missteps aren’t always obvious when you’re in the thick of it. Avoiding similar pitfalls is about preparation and awareness.
Ultimately, the scariest thing in marketing isn’t failure – it’s making the same mistakes over and over. This Halloween, instead of fearing the ghosts of marketing past, embrace them. Learn from your (and others) failures, adapt your approach and move forward with greater confidence.
