Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Welcome to the world's number one podcast on Marketing Mistakes by Prohibition PR. This podcast is specifically for senior marketers determined to grow their brands by learning from real-world screw ups.
Each week, join hosts Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, seasoned PR professionals with over 45 years of combined experience, as they candidly explore the marketing failures most marketers would rather forget. Featuring insightful conversations with industry-leading marketing experts and value-packed solo episodes, the show tries to uncover the valuable lessons from genuine marketing disasters and, crucially, the tips and steps you need to take to avoid them.
Chris and Will bring practical experience from founding the award-winning PR agency Prohibition PR, where they have successfully guided top brands to significant growth through PR strategy, social media, media relations, content marketing, and strategic brand-building.
Tune in to turn f*ck ups into progress, mistakes into lessons, and challenges into real-life competitive advantages. Well, we hope so anyway.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Food Marketing FAIL: My Culinary Embarrassment with Meena Patak
Tamsin Daniel, a senior marketing professional and Head of Marketing at Firetree Chocolate, shares her embarrassing culinary f*ck up while supporting celebrity chef Meena Patak during a cooking show filmed in India.
What begins as an exciting opportunity quickly descends into chaos with illness and a fundamental misunderstanding about chickpeas. š¤£
ā¢ Becoming violently ill on day one after eating something unsuitable
ā¢ Responsibility for preparing ingredients for Mina's outdoor cooking demonstration
ā¢ Mina forced to improvise a new recipe when faced with rock-hard, unusable chickpeas
ā¢ Living down "Chickpea Gate" among colleagues
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This show's about marketing, fuck-ups and mistakes. And have you got a mistake involving chickpeas? I have, yeah, yeah, yeah, at least they're good for you, at least they're good for me. I knew nothing about chickpeas at the time. I have to. That's my starting point. So, yeah, trying to find it Well, thinking of a story that I could actually tell. We have so many people coming on the show going, I can't tell you the stories once. Once the cameras are off, the cameras are off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am quite early in my my time at patax, I was given the opportunity to go with mina patak um to india. Which part of india was it? Well, we did a bit of it. So we went to um chen, which used to be called Madras, now Chennai, and we went across to Kerala to sort of do the spice trail, so following the spices and how they come from the spice plantations down to the port at Cochin. And my job was to ensure that Meena had everything she needed. She was doing a cookery program, so we had a film crew come out from New Zealand to film this cookery show with her. And there was a point at which, at one of the hotels we were staying at beautiful place in the hills. They were going to be doing this open air cooking and it was my job to make sure all of the ingredients were there. Everyone knew how Mina needed to be doing this, this open air cooking, and it was my job to make sure all of the ingredients were there. Everyone knew what, how Mina needed to be supported. I was also there to sort of support Mina generally.
Speaker 1:My day one I ate something I should have done and was absolutely sick as a dog, I mean really ill and and I just hadn't prepared for that for a start. So I had, no, I had nothing with me. I didn't have anything to take. Thankfully mina did. She was, I think she was used to taking people out who got just you two there. Then, yeah, it was just us from patax. And then there was this early career experience, not, yeah, yeah, well, not so much the getting sick, no, that was horrific and I, so day one I was out of action completely. Day two, I was still having to run to the loo every now and again. It was pretty horrific, couldn't eat anything as well. So all this amazing food and I was not able to eat it. I had some poppadoms and that was about all I could stomach.
Speaker 1:But then we got to the bit where we were going to do the filming, and one of the ingredients required to be on hand for Mina was chickpeas. Now, I'd only ever seen chickpeas in a can. I thought that's how they came, never even occurred to me that they came in another way. And she got to all of this food laid out, all the ingredients laid out, and the chickpeas were rock hard because apparently they come in dried form. Who knew?
Speaker 1:I didn't, um, and of course the dish was impossible. She couldn't cook, um, because you, you need to soak them overnight. They're like 12 hours soaking time. It's not like you can even rush, it is it? No, you couldn't rush. It was it for a dal then was it? I can't. It was some sort of chickpea dish, but it was. It was like the main ingredient in this dish and all she.
Speaker 1:She had all of the kitchen staff running around trying to. I mean, she had to think on her feet. She's an amazing cook, um, and she just came up with an alternative recipe. The kitchen staff were running off trying to find all the ingredients for this particular thing. Chickpeas knocking around.
Speaker 1:There weren't any tins of chickpeas and I thought, you know, there was a bit of me that thought I could quite easily say it was their mistake because they'd misunderstood what I needed. But I was like, no, I have to, I really have to own up to this one, because I didn't want these poor kitchen staff to take the fall for me. So I did own up. What did Mina say? Well, at that point she was quite frazzled because obviously trying to figure out what else. But the following day it was absolutely fine. It was absolutely fine. She's lovely. A bit of sweating, weren't you? I was not in a nice way. The recovery from the sickness yeah, but somebody I can't remember who, somebody gifted me a pack of chickpeas after I got back, because they'd obviously heard about the story. Yeah, and it took a while to live that one down. Chickpea gates, yeah, yeah.
