In my post this week, I wanted to delve into the unfortunate marketing choices made by some of the biggest companies in the world. Through my study in marketing, I am being taught good practice and proper technique for business success however even the best trained marketers make poor choices.
smiteme flickr.com
Firstly, I am going to talk about McDonalds banner ad, nicknamed “I’d hit it.” If you haven’t heard of it, McDonalds Company considers itself lucky; quite the opposite of what a typical marketing campaign goes for. As you can see from the image above, the wording on the banners are quite misleading and can be offensive. You can tell that MacDonald’s is trying to target those with lower income who already know the brand; however it pertains to something else quite offensive. The ad was taken down 30 minutes after it was released onto the web, claiming that they misunderstood the meaning of the language. I personally don’t know how that got through the marketing chain of command.
The second marketing disaster took place during a live demonstration of the new windows 7 speech recognition tool (Video above). There is a risk that comes along with a live demo, that being the fact that a malfunction makes your product look horrible to the audience. However the reward is high if the product performs well, creating a marketing buzz and the audience becomes advocates for your company. You would have thought that Microsoft would have learned their lesson on live demos after this stunt gone wrong, but no they did not. Even though this was a humorous screw up, Microsoft suffered a loss in popularity due to this failed marketing ploy. Clearly they did not test the speech recognition with a crowd of people in the room again pertaining to the fact that even the best marketers are not perfect.