Marketing disasters: Westpac’s monkey business tops 2009 list
It’s been a big year of marketing disasters for some unfortunate brands, with Westpac taking the mantle as the biggest loser in Mumbrella’s top ten list of the year’s Biggest Marketing Disasters, thanks to its patronising comparison of the price of bananas to its hike in interest rates.
Top 10 marketing disasters for 2009:
- Westpac – Banana smoothies
- Toyota Yaris – Clean Getaways
- Kraft – Vegemite iSnack 2.0
- Telstra admin charge to pay your phone bill
- Tiger Woods
- Witchery – Girl with the jacket
- Tourism Queensland – Fake tattoo
- Kyle & Jackie O
- Australian tourism – attacks on Indian students
- Coca Cola Kerry Armstrong/ Myth busting
The bank created an internal video to help staff understand the changes in the economic environment as a consequence of the global financial crisis. It seemed a simple and straight forward enough idea.
Not convinced that Westpac’s was worse then Kraft’s Vegemite iSnack 2.0
Where’s Witchery? The list needs to go to 11.
oh I just saw it. Was too busy looking for the man.
Do you notice they are almost chronological – going backwards. I think this shows that the trend it to be outraged then very quickly move on to the next thing. Who would have thought 2 months ago that i-snack would not top the list?
iSnack was robbed…
Show me the sales data on:
– Vegemite
– iSnack 2.0 against the target audience
Vegemite may have poorly managed a PR disaster but I want to see some FMCG numbers first. I think when we see the incremental increase of sales on Vegemite we may forgive our 2.0 friend.
2009 is going to go down as a classic year for brands behaving badly. And what rich case studies these are going to provide for all those aspiring marketers looking to learn how not to manage a brand.
Westpac’s wasn’t a marketing disaster. What it was was an example of a PM who should stick to doing his job rather than trying to ride every populist bandwagon that passes. (If he wanted to actually do something about it rather than leap aboard the passing bandwagon, he could easily have raised his existing party policy for making mortgages as portable as mobile phone numbers. But no, much easier to go for the quick sound bite and achieve absolutely nothing!)
Vegemite’s fiasco was by far the worst of the year. To launch a product at halftime in the AFL grand final and have the net go ballistic with criticism before anyone won the flag is an achievement beyond anything any marketer has managed in the nation’s history.
Fabulous list.
Big brands making big mistakes, which could easily have been avoided big time.
The list could include Cadbury making its chocolate bar smaller and substituting ingredients… Jeopardising a ridiculously high market share
Surely the Velocity gold card upgrade e-mail deserves a mention in the fail awards.
Sure, they’re all “errors in judgement”, but I reckon that when those “errors” are deliberate attempts to dupe an audience, they deserve more disaster points.
Does anyone involved with this blog have even the faintest idea of what marketing is? Kraft/Vegemite has SMASHED it this year. something like one in 5 households has a jar of iSnack2.0 in the fridge. A few self-appointed “experts” have branded it a failure. Hmmm…..what should I look to for information….sales data or the opinion of some online pundit who has a blog with the word “marketing” mispelled in it.
I have never seen so many people who think they know so much and actually know so little talk so much rubbish about a single topic.
And they’re STILL talking about it. And buying it in huge quantities. And coming back to Vegemite in huge quantities as well. Suckers.
@RexD – well put!
Where’s the list of brands that took no risks in 2009? I barely watch TV these days, so I can’t tell you whether my brand affinity has changed for the traditional big names, but what I can say for sure is that a brand that takes a risk, is a brand that is hungry. And a brand that is hungry tends to be at the top of my mind.
@Rex D
Do you think it might be pertinent to look at the product over a longer term?
Would there be… isnack2.0 or whatever it is called now… in 20% of household’s fridges if it was called something else? I suspect that any new vegemite product would get a trial from consumers, given how popular the original is. But how many times after that would they buy it?
Isn’t this supposed to be about building brands, not controversy?
Wow the hierarchy of this list really does show how quickly stuff gets forgotten. I-Snack should have been the winner here mainly because it caused every viewer of the AFL Grand Final to comment on how stupid it was. Watch Chris Brown’s star rise again to see how quickly people forget and this article on Cracked really shows what the public are willing to forgive
http://www.cracked.com/article.....-they-did/
O.f.f.s Isnack was clearly a stunt planned well in advance, I can’t believe how gullible the mainstream media are.
It reminds me of when a donut chain opened recently in Melbourne, they offered free packs of donuts to people, which naturally caused a crush of people at the shopping centre, the media went on and on about how people were ‘stampeding’ the store, but none of them mentioned the obvious fact they were giving their product away free, thus causing the stampede.