3 Marketing Mistakes I’ll Never Make Twice — And How You Can Avoid Them
Nobody bats 1.000 in the marketing industry.
When you’re working to promote a wide range of different products — from mail-order food gifts to self-published books like my team is at BookBaby — you’re bound to make a mistake or two. There are simply too many moving parts to prevent every slip-up. As someone who has worked in marketing for over 15 years, I know this all too well.
But I don’t entirely regret any single one of the many mistakes I’ve made — at least not the first time I made them.
Because the best in the business are willing to try new things.
And with being adventurous and innovative comes great risk of making mistakes. That’s the nature of the beast.
But the truth is, mistakes are valuable — not only for self-learning, but for their potential to prevent others from making them in the first place.
Of course, business textbooks are filled with history’s most infamous marketing blunders — my personal favorite being the New Coke disaster of 1985.
That year, the two cola giants — Pepsi and Coca-Cola — were locked in an intense, all-out battle for America’s favorite dark, syrupy, fizzy soft drink. Coca-Cola had always held the edge, but Pepsi was quickly gaining ground and threatening to take the throne. One of Pepsi’s most notable power moves was the Pepsi Challenge, which showcased a group of blind taste-testers overwhelmingly preferring Pepsi to Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola knew they had to respond. And so they did — in the worst possible way.
They trashed their existing, beloved 100-year-old recipe in favor of an entirely “New Coke.” Most notably, it was much sweeter than old Coke. (Which, of course, was already plenty sweet).
New Coke was revealed in April of 1985. Despite massive multi-million dollar ad campaigns and slick new packaging, it was a miserable failure. The blame, allegedly, was cast on a poor interpretation of data. Coke’s internal tests agreed with the Pepsi Challenge results: It confirmed people did prefer Pepsi’s slightly sweeter flavor to Coke’s in a sip test.
But who drinks just a sip?
What Coca-Cola didn’t account for was that, while people prefer Pepsi upon first sip, they actually enjoy a Coke more when drinking a whole can. Pepsi’s saccharine formula proved a bit too sweet for some, which Coke overlooked as a major advantage. Not only that, but Coke also forfeited one of its greatest values by creating New Coke: its nostalgia. Coke was (and is) an American icon — and its alteration was answered with great offense.
New Coke was a complete failure.
And its advent tarnished Coca-Cola’s image forever while allowing Pepsi to gain huge revenue and market share boosts. Just a few months later, Coke admitted it made a huge mistake and reverted back to the original recipe.
Thankfully, none of my marketing mistakes were quite so consequential. But I have, certainly, made my fair share of marketing blunders.
Here are a few that stand out — and how you can avoid them.
1: Not sweating the details
In the heyday of catalog marketing, my company would print millions of mail order catalogs in a single print run to save money.
The immense volume we dealt with created urgency — and problems, especially when it came to the attention to detail. Of course, when mailing millions of catalogs, you’re not licking stamps on each one. So we direct marketers would print an “indicia” on the mailing panel, which includes a mailing permit number for the post office.
But one time, we used the wrong indicia — which meant three million catalogs were illegally marked, and therefore undeliverable.
We had recently switched printing companies and had accidentally used our previous printer’s mailing information. We didn’t discover it until after we began mailing. We hoped for the best, but not long after, a postal inspector called to tell me they wouldn’t be able to deliver the catalogs.
Long story short: I contacted the U.S. Postal Service headquarters and begged them to take pity on us and send them anyway. Eventually, they agreed. Crisis narrowly averted.
A similar situation: We once sent 25,000 postcards to customers with a limited-time sale offer, prompting them to use a new toll-free number. The problem? We printed the number as 1–888 instead of our actual number, which began with 1–800.
Where did the 888-number ring into? An adult X-rated chat line. As soon as we realized the mistake, we came to a deal with the owner of the 888-number to avoid further embarrassment.
The lesson for marketers? There’s no detail too small to check, double-check, or triple-check. Sometimes it’s the smallest errors that doom an entire marketing campaign.
2: Working with incomplete data
A few years ago, I had the bright idea of using radio commercials to promote self-publishing.
I thought I did my homework well. Our authors’ demographics matched very closely to the audiences of popular local news and talk radio stations in the Philadelphia market. For that reason alone, I was sure it’d be a home run.
It was not.
Despite running hundreds of commercials over 90 days during the best time slot — the morning commute — we received very few calls. As it turns out, I I overlooked two key factors: I didn’t look into whether radio ads convert sales at a good rate (they don’t), or what our potential customers’ purchasing habits were.
The lesson to be learned?
Make sure the data you use to justify a marketing campaign is complete. Complete data is essential to creating and running marketing campaigns. My mistake was trusting that my limited data justified the spend.
3: Not keeping up to date
At AVL Digital Group, we were initially a bit behind the technology curve.
As mobile devices began to take over and desktop use decreased, we were still focusing mostly on improving our desktop website. As a result, we were late to create a mobile-friendly website capable of being read and used on phone-sized screens. So once we did begin spending time and money on updating our websites, it felt like we were doing catch-up work.
Who knows how many customers and clients we may have lost because of a poorly performing mobile website?
The marketing lesson here is that it’s every marketer’s job to keep up with tech trends. Of course, I’m not suggesting you should always jump on every hot, new trend — those could just be fads. Rather, we must be able to discern fads from legitimate trends and industry developments.
For example, everyone’s currently keeping an eye on blockchain and how it may shake up the publishing industry. But we’re not taking action now. Rather, we’re keeping tabs on it.
Every marketer should be well-informed, aware, and diligent about keeping up with the marketing industry as a whole as well as their own individual industry.
While I’m not necessarily proud of these mistakes — whether they were exclusively my fault or a foresight on the part of my entire team — I don’t entirely regret any of them. Learning moments are illuminating and beneficial, so long as you view them as such. Especially in a complex, ever-changing field with many moving parts like marketing, mistakes are inevitable — but also invaluable.
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