When branding campaigns go wrong

Companies and organisations spend thousands of pounds on promoting their brand, yet they still manage to get it badly wrong. Take Labour’s pink election campaign minibus, for example, aimed at wooing back crucial women voters but blasted by many social media users as patronising. And it is just one of many brand promotional gaffs that have happened over the years. Here are the best of the rest:

British Airways

If a brand wants to incorporate the word British into its name, it must embrace the pride and heritage that comes with it. While the intentions behind BA’s bold introduction of funky and colourful ‘world art’ tailfins in 1997 were honourable – the featured designs were by international artists representing countries on BA’s route network – many argued that the airline’s brand identity was lost as a result.

Adam Hill, founder and partner at creative agency Designate, says: “The mistake here was to completely give up the iconic nod to the union jack, replacing it with an assortment of pretty, but abstract, designs with no tangible link to the brand. This opened the door for its biggest rivals to make a bigger impact on the runway.”

A key lesson to be learned from this is that brand goes much deeper than a design or logo.

Hill adds: “BA neglected the fact that name and logo are just small parts of the puzzle: to customers, the pride and heritage of this very British brand is what appeals, and swapping that out in order to appear modern and multicultural resulted in the very essence of the brand being diluted.”

Britvic and Tango

Britvic’s soft drink Tango was a great British success story; a compelling brand that had taken on Coca-Cola’s Fanta and beaten it, and done it with some of the most successful advertising campaigns ever broadcast. Decades on, who over the age of 30 doesn’t remember its catchy punchline, ‘You know when you’ve been Tango’d’?

Then Britvic introduced Apple Tango, launching it with another great campaign but one that bore little resemblance to the original. While overall sales grew, they disguised a fall in market share of Orange Tango. Britvic followed up with a blackcurrant flavour, promoting it through yet another different campaign. By treating each product as a separate brand, there was little to connect them back to the core Orange Tango product. Sales of Orange Tango fell 21%, Fanta seized the opportunity to take its place and Tango never recovered.

Brian Millar, head of strategy at brand consultancy Sense Worldwide, says: “The lesson here is, learn to respect the thing that made you famous. BMW knows it has to get the 3 series right or everything else fails. Johnnie Walker supports its Red and Black Labels with big promotional spends – no matter how many expensive variants they create. Know your core product and never neglect it.”

Mr Kipling

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A successful brand and a winning promotional campaign ensured that for years consumers were convinced that Mr Kipling does, indeed, make exceedingly good cakes. However, by the late noughties, Mr Kipling had fallen on hard times, as in-store bakery products enjoyed a surge in popularity.

In an attempt to quickly reinvigorate its tired image, the brand introduced Mrs Kipling, voiced by actress Joan Kempson, but the quick-fix approach wasn’t to everyone’s taste.

Designed to ”reflect the customer”, the Mrs Kipling character only succeeded in grating on them, says Ross Farquhar, partner and group business leader at creative agency 101.

“At her most scarring, she wished he was ‘as exceedingly good at everything else’ while next to her snoring husband in bed,” he said.

When sales failed to respond, her departure was swift and followed by a return of Mr Kipling at his best: warm, comforting and just a little bit magical.

Farquhar says: “The moral of the tale is that throwing the baby out with the bathwater is rarely good advice. However, for the firm that benefits from having valuable brand furniture – whether an icon, catchphrase or jingle – its avoidance is a matter of commercial necessity.”

Starbucks

Starbucks’ Race Together campaign saw baristas writing #racetogether on customers’ coffee cups with the aim of initiating discussion on diversity and racial inequality in America. However, it was criticised for being inappropriate and misjudged, which resulted in Starbucks dropping the campaign.

When a brand fails, the company has the opportunity to recover if it acknowledges its mistake and moves on, as Starbucks did when it realised the campaign wasn’t right and wouldn’t produce the results it hoped for.

But it did sound a warning to other companies planning similar campaigns, says Dan Bobby, chief executive of brand consultancy Calling Brands.

“You need to have credibility and authority on the subject matter if the campaign is going to generate a positive impact,” he says. “Despite race being a subject that needs to be talked about, Starbucks lacks real credibility to initiate this topic; perhaps fairtrade or globalisation would have been a better conversation starter.”

And while the campaign was designed to encourage conversation between friends, what it really highlighted was the company’s lack of insight and misunderstanding of their customers.

“Race may be a topic close to the individual’s heart, but it’s unlikely to be a conversation held whilst grabbing a coffee,” says Bobby.

2020 Tokyo Olympic Games

There’s more to designing a logo than simply choosing the right shapes, colours and fonts. It also has to be unique because no matter how beautiful it looks, a logo that turns out to be a copy can spell disaster for the organisation.

It’s something the organisers of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games know only too well after Belgian graphic designer Olivier Debie filed a lawsuit against the international Olympic committee, claiming the logo designed by Kenjiro Sano bore an obvious resemblance to his design for the Théâtre de Liège. The Tokyo 2020 organising committee withdrew the emblem and set up a new committee to design and select a new logo.

The organisers of the Olympic games fell into a common trap; they’d overlooked checking the uniqueness of the designs to avoid possible copyright infringement scandals, says Sol Fauquier, European PR manager of 99designs.

He says: “The key message emerging from the Olympics Games branding fiasco is that organisations and companies must take the issue of copyright more seriously than ever before. Even though a design may not infringe copyright laws, a badly planned and executed branding programme can quickly attract criticism on the internet – and generate into a crisis.”

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