With the economy struggling, I am reminded of Business 2.0’s “101 Dumbest Moments in Business“. Some are marketing tactics that did not do as well as originally planned. While the use of the tactics were in cases, intentional, the outcomes were not. Some are internal marketing tactics and some are external tactics.
So here are a few examples of past mistakes not to repeat, especially in these hard economic times.
RadioShack
RadioShack fires 400 staffers via e-mail. Affected employees receive a message that reads, “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.”
Bank of America
After Bank of America announces plans to outsource 100 tech support jobs from the San Francisco Bay Area to India, the American workers are told that they must train their own replacements in order to receive their severance payments.
Northwest Airlines
Bankrupt Northwest Airlines begins laying off thousands of ground workers, but not before issuing some of them a handy guide, “101 Ways to Save Money.” The advice includes dumpster diving (“Don’t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash”), making your own baby food, shredding old newspapers for use as cat litter, and taking walks in the woods as a low-cost dating alternative.
Here are a couple Web 2.0 related incidents…
McDonald’s
McDonald’s runs a promotional contest in Japan in which it gives away 10,000 Mickey D’s-branded MP3 players. The gadgets come preloaded with 10 songs – and, in some cases, a version of the QQPass family of Trojan horse viruses, which, when uploaded to a PC, seeks to capture passwords, user names, and other data and then forward them to hackers.
TextTrust
TextTrust, a company that uses a combination of software and human editors to scour the Web for spelling errors, issues a press release on the most commonly misspelled words it has found “on the 16 million we pages it has spell-checked over the past year.”
SOURCE: Business 2.0's "101 Dumbest Moments in Business"
As we all know, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others so you don’t make them yourself. Be sure to run through the possible outcomes and possible issues that may arise from marketing tactics. None of us want to end up on this list.
December 17, 2008 at 7:36 am
Ha! These are great. The economy/workplace is never bad enough that we can’t laugh at ourselves a little bit. Thanks, Travis!
January 7, 2009 at 7:03 am
[...] and gone with celebrations and parties and for some a sigh of relief. Awhile ago I wrote about the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business in 2007 and how it dealt with marketing. This year, in Fortune’s 21 Dumbest Moments in Business 2008, [...]