When the topic of marketing campaigns come up in conversation, often times the most memorable campaigns are those of large companies in the Food and Beverage Industry. It makes sense as their target demographic would be regular people like you and I and thus, their campaigns are geared towards the masses and we get to consume them. And while we tend to remember the more successful campaigns, like Heineken's "Most Intresting Man in the World" campaign or Snickers' "You're not you when you're hungry" campaign, oftentimes we tend to forget the unsuccessful ones. Marketing Campaigns that went so bad, it hurt the company's reputation, finances or the good will consumers had with the brand.
5. Dr. Pepper's "Not for Women" Campaign
Yes, you heard that right. In October of 2011, Dr. Pepper had released a new diet soda called Dr. Pepper Ten and to get the word out, they started a marketing campaign that had the slogan of "It's Not for Women". Apperantly, the goal was to try to appeal to men with this campaign as researched showed that men tend to shy away from diet drinks. By marketing towards men, they could create a new customer segment in the diet beverage market and profit from it. However, obviosuly, they did this in the most comedically out of touch fashion possible and were quickly lambasted by the media and consumers for it.
4. Pepsi's "Live for Now" Campaign
While you may be unfamiliar with the name of this campaign, you may already know the infamous ad made in April 2017 by Pepsi that is associated with it. In what was a turbulent time in recent memory, where protests against police brutality, injustice and Racism were at an all time high in the U.S, Pepsi thought it would be a good idea to make an ad about the protests that would "unify everyone". In this ad, famous celebrity Kendall Jenner would walk through a crowd of protestors and hand a police officer a can of pepsi. This ad backfired tremendously, recieving immidiate and harsh criticism from everyone. On Twitter hashtags like #PepsiLivesMatter were trending and Pepsi had to issue an apology for their tone-deafness and for putting Kendall Jenner in a bad position.
3. Burger King's "King of Stream" Campaign
During the height of the pandemic, everyone stayed at home and consumed media digitally. Whether that be videos, social media or video games, many streaming sites exploded in popularity in 2020 and 2021. During that period, Burger King saw the popularity of these sites and decided to try and take advantage of it. On the massive live-streaming site known as Twitch, viewers can send in donations to their favorite streamers and with these donations you can put in a message that is read by a computer. So, what Burger King did, was that they donated like $5 to streamers and made the computer read out Burger King Advertisements. While this was a very cost-effective campaign that did generate a lot of buzz, it wasn't the good kind of attention they were looking for. Not only was this campaign border-line illegal but it was also highly unethical as they got potentially thousands of dollars of advertising from streamers for only $5. Burger King had to quietly pull the campaign after heavy criticism from the media and the internet.
2. Pepsi's "Number Fever" Campaign
Although this is the most obscure campaign on this list, the repricussions from this campaign made it worthy to be put on this list. Back in 1992, Pepsi was looking to grow in some of it's foreign markets, one of which being the Phillippines. In order to grow their market share there, they set up a marketing campaign, in which, they would print numbers from 001 to 999 along with a confirmation code on the back of their caps, and hold a raffle where if you had a cap with the right numbers you could win a prize. The grand prize in this case was 1 Million Pesos (or around $40,000 USD in 1992) and was initially very successful as Pepsi's Market Share went from 19.4% to 24.9%. However at some point a grave error was made as a specific number, 349, was accidentally printed on over 800,000 bottle caps without a confirmation code and that number was the grand prize winner. Of course, people began trying to claim their grand prizes not knowing that, without the code, their cap didn't count and they didn't win. Pepsi executives recieved death threats, riots were had and a total of 5 people ended up losing their lives in the chaos. This incident ended up being called "The 349 Incident" and would be one of the disaterous marketing campaigns Pepsi ever ran. Pepsi ended up having to pay out around 8.9 Million dollars total to over 400,000 people.
1. Coca Cola's "New Coke" Campaign
When we think of terrible marketing campaigns, Coca Cola's "New Coke" Campaign is one of the first to come to mind. The "New Coke" Campaign was Coca Cola's attempt to shoot the Coca Cola brand back into relevance. Since WW2, they have seen their Cola market share drop from 60% to around 24% in the 80s thanks in large part to their rival, Pepsi. So, they felt like they had to shift their main Coca-Cola beverages from the original formula to something new and they did just that, releasing "New Coke" in 1985 while simultaneously stopping production of their original Coke products. What they did not anticipate was just how many people cared about their original Coke products and just how many people disliked "New Coke". Massive boycotts in the south were held, Coca Cola was made a national laughing stock, organisations with the expressed purpose of protesting against Coca Cola were made and generally people complained about how terrible "New Coke" tasted. If there was ever a point that Coca Cola was at it's weakest and almost died as a company, it was during this time period. Eventually, Coca Cola gave up trying to make people forget about their old Coke products and re-released their old Coke products as Coca Cola Classic. "New Coke" would end up slowing fading away into obscurity, ending up being discountued in 2002.
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