Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the world’s leading irreverent podcast for senior marketers who are tired of the polished corporate b*llshit.
Join Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, founders of the award-winning Prohibition PR, as they sit down with industry leaders to dissect the career-ending f*ck-ups they’d rather forget. The show moves past any pretty vanity metrics to uncover the brutal, honest truths behind marketing disasters, from £30,000 SEO black holes and completely failed companies, to social media crises that went globally viral for all the wrong reasons.
We don't just celebrate the f*ck-ups; we extract the tactical blueprints you need to avoid them yourself. If you are a business owner, or a CMO looking for a competitive advantage that only comes from real-world experience, this is your weekly masterclass in resilience and strategy.
- Listen for: Raw stories from top brands, ex-McKinsey strategists, and industry disruptors.
- Learn from: The errors that cost thousands and the recoveries that saved careers.
- Get ahead by: Turning other people's nasty disasters into your unfair market advantage.
If you have a story to tell and would like to appear on the show, tell us your biggest marketing mistake and drop us a line.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
FAIL: Hops and Dreams: The Beer That Nobody "Cheers'd" To
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Rachel Auty, head of marketing at Brew York, discusses the brewery birthday celebration that featured collaborations with international breweries like Lervig and Hidden Springs, creating six beers with a Eurovision tie-in called "Collabivision."
What seemed like marketing genius internally received a lukewarm public reception, teaching them valuable lessons about keeping messaging focused and straightforward.
• Timed release with Eurovision in the UK and called it "Collabivision"
• Created adventurous beer flavours including a cherry stout
• Found the concept exciting internally but met with public indifference
• Realised we had too many marketing messages competing for attention
For the full episode visit: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2206375/episodes/13748919
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Birthday Beer Collaborations Explained
Speaker 1So for our birthday party this year, we decided we were going to brew a series of beers. We did collaborations with, like international breweries really exciting proposition. We kind of, you know, we got Lervig, we got Hidden Springs. From America, we got gosh who else did we get? Anyway, it was a set of six incredible international breweries and we were like, let's do a collab, you know, six beers collab with each. And we thought we were being, I mean, it was a bit genius. You know, we tied into the Eurovision because we were like, what's going on at the time? We're going to be releasing these Eurovision, brilliant, it's in the UK, this is fantastic. So we made these beers and we we called them collabivision okay, and it was, you know, a lot of genius in there too much.
Marketing Lessons Learned
Speaker 1I feel like we got a lot more excited internally than perhaps the public did. Like there was a I mean, obviously we wanted to get people talking about it, but the beers themselves were like really quite um, adventurous flavors, like stuff. A little bit like there was one that was a bit a bit more sensible. It was like a stout with cherry and that was fine. But there were some that were a little bit crazy and I feel like there was just too much going on in that series. I feel like the the concept was great on its own and the beers were really interesting on their own, but together I feel like some things just got a bit noisy yeah, a bit too noisy.
Keep It Simple Principle
Speaker 1We tried too hard. Too many messages, too clever. Yeah, too many messages is a big thing. They say try and keep it simple, don't they? Because otherwise people just loot. You lose it. Yeah, and we've all done that, haven't we? You know, when you come up with an amazing campaign, you're high-fiving in the office, yeah, yeah, and it's met with indifference, yeah, and then like three people go oh, wow.
