Marketing Fails

Sometimes you have to wonder if some companies actually did their due diligence of market research before releasing campaigns that would surprise or worse, offend it’s customers.

We can remember Dove’s 2017 campaign which was called “Real Beauty” featuring a diverse set of women. Their ad included a group of different races of women each removing their shirt, which was the same color as their skin, moving from person to person. The “idea” was to show it doesn’t matter what your race is, Dove is for you. All good; however, the order of showing the African American woman removing her shirt going into a Caucasian after “using Dove” hit a nerve. Some seeing it as your dark skin is not clean enough. They were not intending it… but something as small as that can make a difference.

Many a time in my years of research, I recall doing several storyboard and concept testing where a small element of a photo, a group of objects arranged a certain way or just an underlying tone was pointed out by a respondent as unsettling. Hearing the words from one physician over a small object in the concept, “we would never have object XYZ in an exam room like that… that’s a concern.”

All of this to say that creating a campaign is extremely hard work and quite nuanced.
For a more recent blunder: Check out Gemini’s AI commercial run in last years Olympics.