Don’t believe that stuff they tell you at the start of B2B marketing brainstorms: there is most definitely such a thing as a bad marketing idea. And those ideas deserve to be celebrated, dissected, enthused about and learned from – often far more than ideas that are relatively good (or are, at least, not quite as bad).
Bad ideas can be compelling, fun, illuminating and inspiring. The simple fact that you’re reading this post suggests I’m right about this. However, when we insist that they aren’t really bad ideas; that they are commendable, average, no better or worse than any other, we rob them of this power and take away their ability to capture the imagination and inform our future actions. Within every bad idea there’s usually a spark of genuine creative thinking that emboldened somebody to come up with something flawed and disastrous. If you can isolate that spark of creativity, it’s worth celebrating – and as an extra bonus, it’s surrounded by insights about what the limits of creativity can turn out to be. That’s why bad marketing ideas often make for great and informative marketing stories.
This sudden conviction about the value of bad ideas hit me when I was editing the films for our B2B Dinner for Five show, which we released on this blog a couple of weeks ago. You might remember that one of these films asked our B2B marketing dinner guests about the worst idea they’d ever had. What struck me looking back at the video was how much people’s faces light up when you invite them to do this. Discussing our bad ideas and what made them so bad is cathartic – but it’s also a great trigger for future creativity. Smiling about concepts that didn't’ work somehow frees us from constraints and opens the ideas for other creative ideas that might work better.
To celebrate their value, I wanted to share some of my favourite bad ideas in marketing, including my own. In each case, I’ve done my best to separate what made them potentially brilliant from what doomed them to ultimate failure. If you’ve got any bad ideas of your own that you’re proud of then I recommend doing the same. Apparently, you can learn from success, but it can be a lot more interesting learning from failure:
Why Heinz rejected Don Draper’s ad campaign
It’s one of the most striking pieces of advertising creativity in the whole of Mad Men: Don Draper presents a series of ads for Heinz Ketchup that features no shot of the product – and no mention of the word ‘Ketchup’. It’s a bold idea that appeals so much to modern marketers that Heinz actually launched it as a campaign this year. In the context of the show, though, it fell pretty flat. Why? Did the Mad Men screenwriters not appreciate how much of a great idea it was? Or were they perfectly anticipating what the reaction of the client would have been at the time?
If you ask me, there’s a flaw in Don Draper’s pitch that qualifies it perfectly as a brilliant, bad idea. It’s true that not showing the product leaves everything to the audience’s imagination. However, the strategic idea rests on the assumption that, in the late 1960s, people only associated Heinz with one product. This would have been a major misjudgment. In fact, the company had by this point built its identity around providing at least 57 different products, from soup to salad cream and baked beans. Asking the client to invite consumers to only associate the word Heinz with Ketchup and the foods you use Ketchup with? It was always going to be a non-starter because it ran completely contrary to the business’s strategy. Don’s idea may have been ahead of its time – but that doesn’t make it a good idea at the time it was presented.
Pets.com – great idea, pity about the maths
…which is exactly what the founders of Pets.com probably thought as they watched the eCommerce revolution take off years after their business had become one of the most high-profile casualties of the dotcom bust. This business had identified a potentially lucrative market segment with a very real need: pet owners who love to pamper their beloved animals but struggle to find the time to do so and therefore need pet food delivered to their door. It launched famously anarchic advertising featuring dog puppets, quickly built a recognisable brand, and convinced lots of investors to sink lots of money into it. There was just one problem: the costs of shipping giant bags of pet food across the country meant that the idea itself was never commercially viable. The fact that 15 years later, delivery prices have fallen and pet food delivery companies make lots of money, is no consolation. It’s a great example of what happens when creative marketing thinking fails to take account of commercial common sense.
The IT trade show and the talking bulldog – what could possibly go wrong?
How can you make the Computers in Manufacturing Trade Show in Birmingham feel intriguing, fun, something you’d want to not only find out about, but talk to your friends and colleagues about? How do you build real buzz for an IT event? A young Doug Kessler, now the co-founder and creative director of Velocity Partners, was convinced he had the answer: a print ad featuring a bulldog that promised anybody calling a given phone number that he’d tell them all about the reasons they should come to the show.
Genius, right? As Doug put it: “Who wouldn’t want to call up a number and hear a dog tell them why they should go to a trade show?” Not only would the ad stand out a country mile in all the IT trade press, but it would make people laugh (or at least smile), it would refuse to make sense – ensuring that they paid it prolonged attention. Doug recorded a message, in the character of the dog, telling the avalanche of callers that would result why the Computers in Manufacturing show deserved to be in their diary? Guess how many people called: absolutely none.
Move over Star Wars – it’s the Science Fiction epic inspired by bad grammar
I blame Miley Cyrus for this one. I was looking at her Instagram page (Yes, I had a good reason – No, I don’t remember what it was), when I realised that none of the captions for the pictures featured any correct spellings or grammar. Miley appeared to be single-handedly destroying the English language – reducing it down to a series of phonetic noises and deliberate mis-spellings. I spent an entire train journey musing about this – and then came up with my most-ambitious-ever content marketing idea: a science fiction epic where civilization collapses as people lose the ability to communicate properly. A resistance movement is finally born when somebody finds a burned-out copy of Everybody Writes by Ann Handley, and starts building a secret network of people who are able to express ideas and inspire others. Let’s just say I’m still waiting for the call from Hollywood.
The music blog that listens to songs nobody wants to listen to
It’s one of the most inspiring content ideas I’ve ever heard: John Watton, the Marketing Director of Adobe, had heard that something like 90% of the tracks on Spotify have never been played – not even once. From this insight came a genuinely original content idea: every day he would become the first person to listen to a forgotten Spotify track, he’d write a review of it, and he’d rate it according to how well it aligned with his mood on that particular day. Not only had he come up with a purposeful content idea (rescuing other people’s creativity from the vault), he’d also invented a completely new form of data that reflects the role that streaming music services play in the soundtrack to people’s lives.
There was just one problem with this particular content strategy: the amount of effort involved in no way aligned with the potential for reward. After just a few weeks of listening to tracks that nobody else wanted to listen to (often with good reason), John was seriously struggling to find anything meaningful to say about any of them. He’d overestimated the amount of value in the content he was curating – and he’d committed himself to a content frequency that was completely unmanageable. He battled on for a year – and by the end of that year, he absolutely hated the idea of listening to another unknown track. He laughs about it now – but I think there’s a lesson in there. If you don’t align frequency with the amount of quality content you realistically have, you’ll kill the passion of your own content team – and you’ll quickly lose the interest of your audience as well.
The movie about bad marketing ideas – that was itself a bad marketing idea
I’m not the first person to become convinced of the value of bad marketing ideas. In 1990, Dudley Moore starred in a movie entirely dedicated to them. Crazy People centred on an advertising creative who suffers a nervous breakdown and responds by coming up with shockingly authentic ads for the major products of the day. There’s a real irony to this film: some of its marketing ideas are absolute genius (I’m convinced Volvo actually based its brand strategy around one of them), but they are also, often deeply offensive (this was a Dudley Moore film after all) - far too offensive to have worked in real life.
It strikes me that’s often the real flaw in bad marketing ideas – a lack of empathy and a frame of reference for how they will appear to other people. They feel hilarious, insightful and intelligent inside our own heads, but put them out into the open and they suddenly seem very different. That’s why creativity often works best in small, tightly knit groups of people who can trust each other to give honest feedback on ideas without any repercussions for those coming up with them – celebrating the bad ideas, but intervening before somebody actually goes through with them.
Crazy People itself fell into the brilliant but bad category. Somebody at Paramount Pictures must have though a film about the oddities of advertising would be hilarious to the world at large – it wasn’t. It may be a cult movie now, but this film tanked at the box office and made back only two-thirds of its budget: a film about bad but brilliant marketing ideas that was itself a brilliant but very bad marketing idea.
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