Author: Rob Gray
Publisher: Crimson Publishing
Reviewer: Kim Nguyen, marketing director, Technology Trust
Learning from failure is the overarching theme of Rob Gray’s Great Brand Blunders: The Worst Marketing and Social Media Meltdowns of All Time…and How to Avoid Your Own. Gray has compiled a veritable ‘greatest hits’ of marketing mistakes and failures from some of the world’s most well-known brands. The anecdotes range from classics like the Hoover free flights fiasco to Coca-Cola and newer social media trials like Gap’s logo turnaround and much abused hashtags from Waitrose, McDonald’s and of course, #susanalbumparty. Some made me giggle or gasp, but mostly I was just glad I wasn’t involved.
The book is just shy of 250 pages and I must admit I found myself losing interest and skipping around. It seems that Great Brand Blunders was written for people to dip in and out of – reading it straight through was fairly laborious and I often skipped to the ‘Tips and lessons’ section at the end of each chapter after reading the first few anecdotes.
To help us all learn from and avoid these disasters ourselves, Gray’s tips provide a few key points to take on board. They’re fairly basic, but can be useful, especially for more junior marketers. I’ve summed them up here:
- Do your homework. Make sure you know what you want to achieve and who your audience is before launching any new product, campaign or partnership.
- If you invite your customers to have a say, be prepared to take their comments on board, acknowledge their criticisms and, if appropriate, change your tack. Also keep an eye out for malicious trolls and those out for a laugh – especially if you’re using social media.
- Don’t try too hard to be funny – humour is often misconstrued, can often backfire and generally doesn’t translate well across cultural barriers.
- Finally, honesty is always the best policy. You’ll recover more quickly from a blunder by acknowledging it, taking responsibility and putting measures in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Star Rating: 3/5
