2018 Brand Failures

We generally focus posts on clever, interesting, and/or effective marketing news but this post is all about marketing failures.  Marketing Dive recently posted an article titled “Relive the year’s 6 biggest brand fails — they carry important lessons for marketers” that covers failures from Facebook (via Cambridge Analytica), Papa John’s, McDonald’s, Heinekin, Snapchat, and the digital media ecosystem.

The causes of these failures are varied but the impact is significant.  For instance, following a redesign of the Snapchat app, influencer Kylie Jenner tweeted that she didn’t use the app anymore.  That tweet erased $1.3B of Snapchat’s market value overnight.  McDonald’s tried to show support for Women’s Day by flipping their golden arches upside down but it wound up being perceived as a publicity stunt and drew attention to some of McDonald’s own issues related to it’s female employees.  The article covers these issues and more as well as talking about some of the lessons to be learned from each case.