7 Really, Really Bad Marketing Campaigns

Marketing is an interesting beast to tame. Some days it’s your best friend, working with you, ‘having your back’, making you lots of new friends; this is the good side. Then you catch it on a bad day and it turns into a raging animal of offensive, inappropriateness, and down right irrational behaviour.

When you’re a major brand, the levels of embarrassment caused by this unpredictable beast can reach an epic scale. There’s nowhere to hide when your disasters are displayed for literally the world to see, especially when they’re picked up by bloggers time and time again, for a fun and humorous blog post.

Pepsi Expands into China

When Pepsi decided to expand their presence in China, obviously their catchy slogan “Pepsi brings you back to life,” featured heavily in all of their marketing materials. And why wouldn’t it? The idea being that when you drink Pepsi, you become alert and awake; you’re brought back to life. Makes perfect sense.

Although little did Pepsi know, until it was too late, that their catchy international-market-breaking slogan, actually translated to, “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.” Oops.

Facebook is like…

A chair, apparently. Hang on, what? Facebook is like a chair? Really? Are you sure you’ve got that right Facebook? You’re saying that you’re like a chair?

With an increasing amount of media scrutiny and the whole IPO debacle, Facebook decided that what it really needed was a TV campaign that compared the worldwide social media platform to a chair.

Don’t Say the N-Word

Attempting to portray their sales staff as a generous and giving bunch of guys and gals, Renault rolled out their ‘don’t say the N-word’ campaign, and by the N-word, what they really meant was ‘No’ of course.

We guess nobody told them what everybody else believes the 'N-word' to be.

I Take a Sheet in the…

Now we all love a good, well thought through pun. They’re fun and they make your campaign memorable. Sometimes though, although the pun is very clever, it can be incredibly unsuitable and leave readers, especially those in the company of small children just old enough to read, feeling rather uncomfortable.

This is so hilariously inappropriate that you have to wonder; is this actually pure genius? I'm not sure. You decide.

Turkish Airlines are Going Down

Whoever placed this advertisement got it very, very wrong. Although the ad did go viral, the free publicity unfortunately didn’t get the airline an influx of business.

Oh well. On a positive note, before this, I never knew that Turkish Airlines even existed. 

And now I do? 

Nope. Definitely wouldn’t fly with them.

Starbucks Sucks

The main takeaway from this? Look at how your advertisement will look from all angles. We all know Starbucks doesn’t suck, but seeing this continually, we might start to believe it.

Unfortunate? Yes. Lazy? Yes. Funny as hell? Definitely. Put you off drinking Starbucks? Nah.

7-UP for Babies

There are no words.

Come on 7-up. Who came up with this? Shame. On. You.