Bad Marketing Advice in Action (and What We Can Learn)

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Bad marketing advice can make or break a brand. If marketers sidestep well-meaning but counterproductive suggestions, they’re better positioned to capture consumer interest.

What happens if they take this marketing advice to heart? Spoiler alert: It’s not great.

Here are 11 examples of bad marketing advice in action — and what we can learn from these customer-facing failures.

11 Examples of Marketing Advice Gone Wrong

Read on for our list of 11 bad marketing moments, or use the jump links to find your favorite example.

The KFC Calendar Clash
The Gap Logo Lesson
The Pepsi Protest Problem
The Burger King Tweet Trainwreck
The Dove Double-Take
The Bing Brand Debacle
The Huggies Hard Sell
The EA Criminal Catastrophe
The Kenneth Cole Cairo Crash
The Heineken Beer Breakdown
The Audi Audacity

1. The KFC Calendar Clash

On November 9th, 2022, KFC sent a mobile notification to its app users that encouraged them to “treat themselves” some great fried chicken and commemorate Kristallnacht.

The problem? This isn’t a fun German holiday — it’s known as the Night of Broken Glass and is associated with a wave of Nazi attacks against Jewish German populations.

Whoops.

For KFC, the problem stemmed from semi-automated content creation. Put simply, a content creation bot saw that Kristallnacht was listed on the German calendar and assumed it was important. It was — just not for the right reasons.

What we can learn:

Here, the bad advice is taking humans out of the loop. A quick look by staff could have prevented this problem, but instead KFC traded speed for sales. Best bet? If someone tells you to cut out the human connection, don’t take it to heart.

2. The Gap Logo Lesson

From 1990 until 2010, the Gap used the same, familiar logo: Its name in white lettering on a blue background. Sure, it wasn’t the most exciting logo but it was simple, easy to recognize, and generally well-liked.

On October 6th, 2010, however, the Gap debuted a new logo: One with their name in a different font, in black, and with a small blue square in the upper-right corner.

Customer backlash was instant and savage. While Gap tried to salvage the situation by treating customer complaints as a crowd-sourcing exercise, the original logo was back by October 12, 2010.

What we can learn:

While there’s nothing wrong with a change, there’s no reason to fix what isn’t broken. If your logo or name or website is performing well, leave it alone — at least until you’ve gotten a solid amount of customer feedback.