30 Times PR & Companies Messed Up So Bad It Made Some Of Them Face Bankruptcy
Interview
Running a successful corporation can’t be easy, which is why they're typically well-oiled machines kept on tight leashes. But every now and then, companies commit shockingly terrible blunders that will always be remembered as masterclasses in what not to do.
Reddit users have recently been reminding others of some of these historic mistakes, including the biggest PR disasters we’ve watched unfold, so we’ve gathered the worst stories down below. Enjoy reading about these trainwrecks that you can be glad you weren't responsible for, and be sure to upvote the ones that must have required significant damage control!
This post may include affiliate links.
One of Swedens biggest firms for building managing is called Locum. In the late nineties it was very cool for companies to have logos where their names were spelled in lower caps. So the logo was "locum". One Christmas Locum took out big ads in the biggest papers wishing everyone a merry Christmas and conveying the love that they felt for Sweden. How did they decide to do this? By replacing the "o" in locum with a heart of course.
So big ads that looked like this: "l ♥ c*m".
Nestle convincing thousands of women in low income countries that they should wean off their babies and substitute breast milk for extremely expensive formula because breast milk wasn't fully nutritious, but also forcing new mothers to spend 30% of their income JUST on baby formula, which made them try save it to last way longer than it should and ended up killing their kids from malnutrition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
To hear more about how this conversation started, we reached out to the Reddit user who posed the question, "What are some of the worst corporate blunders or PR disasters in history?", and lucky for us, they were kind enough to share some insight. Apparently, their question was inspired by the fact that it was recently the 10 year anniversary of Microsoft's "disastrous" XBox One reveal event.
According to Business Insider, some of the glaring issues with the XBox One at that time were the fact that it required a constant internet connection, it was not compatible with used games, every Xbox One would come with a Kinect motion sensor, and the Xbox One was priced at $500 when it launched (which was $100 more than the PlayStation 4).
Not the worst certainly but the one that makes me smile whenever I think of it.
I work for a pretty big company with offices in pretty much every country. Billions in profit every year and one of the leaders in our field. About 15 years ago there was an internal announcement that we were going to rebrand in a couple months.
A guy who I vaguely knew was already on his way out the door but before he left he grabbed the domain name that the company would definitely want to have as part of their rebranding but had not yet reserved. So a week later when they finally got around to trying to reserve it they found it occupied with a tiny website that only had a gif of a character dancing with the caption, "I got your domain!"
I have no idea what they had to pay him to get it.
This is the kind of priceless thing that he must have felt SO HAPPY to experience
Here’s one happening right now: HBO is rebranding as “Max”.
HBO is a premium brand with decades of quality programming behind it.
Max is generic, vague, and makes me think of soft core p**n.
"I wanted to see what other similarly disastrous corporate/PR blunders happened in history, their impact, and how the company recovered (if at all)," the OP told Bored Panda.
And as far as what causes these disasters, they noted, "I think most blunders are a result of poor planning - from logistics to being ignorant of specific cultures where a promotion happens, or just general lack of awareness to understand when certain ideas or innovations are ready to be received by the public."
In Canada, when the Conservative Party merged with the Reform party they called themselves the Canadian Reform Alliance Party or as all Canadian comedians realized “C**P”. It was hilarious for 48 hours before the changed it. Never forget C**P
Nixon- Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP ending up being called CREEP)
Supposedly years ago, there was a Pepsi slogan "Come Alive with Pepsi" that was mistranslated in Chinese as "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead."
Blockbuster refusing to buy Netflix
According to a book I read, they also turned down buying Red Box.
Blackberry thinking that they are the top in the mobile market so they didn't need to innovate to compete with those new iPhone things from Apple.
The funeral of the iPhone held by Microsoft didn't really turn out good either
Sears dominated the mail order industry for over a century with their catalog. In 1993, they decided that mail order was on the decline and discontinued the catalog. Less than a year later, Jeff Bezos would found Amazon.
Used to circle stuff we wanted for Christmas in Sears catalog. Saved mom and dad time trying to figure it out.
One funny one that always springs to mind is the Britain’s Got Talent winner Susan Boyle releasing her first album and her management coming up with a twitter hashtag to promote it: #susanalbumparty
Sus (Su’s)
A**l
Bum
Party
It trended number one but not because of the actual album lol
* Coke making New Coke
* Kodak refusing to go digital believing people would stay true to film
* Toys R Us neglecting their online sales experience
Have you heard of the [Osborne Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)?
TLDR: Company in 1981 has one of the first home computers on the market, it sounds fantastic and everything. At the launch, CEO says the next version will be so much better.... So everyone decided why buy this version if the next version will be better? We'll wait for V2.
So V1 sold terribly, company folded, there is no V2.
Digiorno trying to make the hashtag "Why I Stayed" be about making pizza at home.
JC Penney tried to eliminate the tons of sales and never-ending discounts on their products by just pricing them at what they would normally be, aiming for a “fair and square” price model. Instead of marking a shirt up to $10 and then having it basically always 40% off, they just priced it at $6, for example. They also ended their prices in solid dollars instead of $0.99 intervals to make it easier to calculate.
No coupons, no sales, but the same price. People always complain about how stuff gets marked up just to get put on sale and how cheap of a gimmick it is, right?
Well turns out people actually love feeling like they’re getting a deal even if they objectively know it’s just set dressing, and JCP lost millions from the strategy and their sales dropped by around a third.
Interesting! I used to work at JCPenney in college in the 90's and remember the line being out the door on certain sale days. Our registers always had the highest totals on those days - I can't believe the higher ups didn't notice this!
The Ford Pinto's propensity to explode when rear-ended.
And Ford making the business decision not to recall because their "cost benefit analysis" showed that lawsuits for injury would be cheaper.
Also, thalidomide.
It was Frances Oldham Kelsey, a young pharmacologist who had just joined the FDA at the time, who rejected the application for marketing of thalidomide in US due to lack of safety data. She was backed by her boss at FDA and stood her ground despite all pressures. Thank you, Mrs. Kelsey.
EMI Music executive telling the Beatles after their audition that EMI wasn't interested because guitar bands were on the way out?
When Game of Thrones botched the most anticipated episode in the series history of one of (the?) biggest shows in history by making it in borderline pitch black. Then explaining themselves by saying people need better TVs….[https://nypost.com/2019/05/01/game-of-thrones-cinematographer-blames-dark-episode-on-bad-tv-settings/amp/](https://nypost.com/2019/05/01/game-of-thrones-cinematographer-blames-dark-episode-on-bad-tv-settings/amp/)
"You're holding it wrong" - Apple©™® about signal problems with the iPhone 4.
Can't believe the Hoover flights to America promotion from the early 90's hasn't come up yet. They offered a pair of return flights to America worth £600 if you spent £100 or more on their stuff. Turned out people thought £100 for a return flight with a free vacuum cleaner was a hell of a deal and it was a disaster that cost the company millions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion
Gerald Ratner calling his own company’s (jeweller) products “c**p” and saying that “a prawn sandwich would last longer” than their earrings at a conference. The company’s value fell by £500m and he had to resign.
Trying to decide which was worse: Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal India that killed 4-8k people and injured maybe 100k, or Chiquita (under a former name) overthrowing the legitimate government of Guatemala with help from the CIA.
Bhopal Gas Tragedy was huge. If you want to know the impact, see the photo of a dead kid clicked by Raghu Rai.. it will haunt you forever
In the art field there are a lot of bad predatory software that people use (ahem adobe ahem) but one of the most well respected softwares was something called clip studio paint. It was single purchase and had amazing features and is something I personally still use. In the last year the company proceeded to go back on it's word and force you to get a subscription or pay several hundreds for a license, add ai art support (which if you don't know, ai art takes art from real artists for their samples which is a huge no no in the field), and most recently they are restricting offline access to paying customers and locking them out if they don't have a credit card on their account. Company went from having a huge loyal fanbase and one of the best reputations in the entire art field to losing everyone who supported them and now are having a piracy crisis which is encouraged by most artists
The Victorian Taxi Association (Australian) had a 2015 social media marketing based around people sharing their good news stories of using taxis. It took a matter of days for it to be overwhelmed by the not-so-good stories. Turns out rather a lot of people had stories that ranged from hiked up fares and smelly taxies, to out-and-out sexual assaults by cabbies. All now being shared under the campaigns hashtag.
Celebrities singing “imagine” at the beginning of the pandemic.
Of all the dumb things humanity does every hour, this wasn't it. I thought it was nice gesture.
Read the words to "Imagine." Basically boil down to "Imagine magically getting rid of everyone who doesn't think and act exactly like I dooooo" Billionaires singing about how wonderful it would be to get rid of all possessions when hundreds of millions of working-class people were thrown out of their jobs didn't exactly ring the genius bell, either.
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This was honestly so dumb but I don't think the celebrities involved deserved so much hate. They had good intentions
Agreed. Reminds me of when my grandmother was lying on the couch with a headache and needed a glass of water. I got a glass and filled it with water from the toilet bowl. Fortunately she heard me. ...3 years old with good intentions.
Load More Replies... Getting rich celebrities' signing from their beautiful mansions while everyone else was struggling in the middle of a pandemic was in my opinion moronic.
just because they're rich doesnt say they didnt suffer. A golden cage is still a cage. They too saw all their plans and project fall into pieces and feared for what was coming.
Load More Replies... Hey, just to add something positive to this comment section, I just remembered the existence of the recreation of The Princess Bride by multiple actors during the lockdown. Filmed in bits in the actors' backyards, with costumes made from household items. It's hilarious if you're a fan of the movie. A much better idea than the Imagine video and I don't think it pissed anyone off. It reminded me of what my friends and I might have done as kids. Seriously delightful. Some of the Inigos were truly fantastic too.
The BBC did a couple songs that had a bunch of celebrities. One was the "Live Lounge AllStars" covering The Foo Fighters' "Times Like These". The other, my favorite, by the BBC Radio 2 AllStars" for the Children in Need charity covered Oasis' "Stop Crying Your Heart Out". I thought both of these were great. But I think one big difference is that these were musicians who, even when singing at home had great sound setups, many of them played instruments, and the editing was phenomenal.
and they weren't singing in lockdown from their mansions in a patronising manner to the "poor public", some in dire situations
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People clapping medics and nurse in France at 8 am, then voting for people who cuts health and hospital costs. And these elected complain now that ''no one wants to work at the hospital anymore '' after broken promises done when sending them a SOS during the pandemic
When the real world spills over your community’s gates, and you don’t know how to react like a person who lives in the real world would. Trying to make it seem like we’re all in this pandemic together, by singing a song on the Internet from your mansion while you don’t have to work because you have enough money in the bank to live off of for several decades, is not only out of touch, it’s low key cruel to those of us who lost or had to leave jobs and wonder how in the flying f**k we were going to pay our bills because of the pandemic.
there was a funny thing in India where a few celebs (aka movie stars) were posting their home exercise video. finally it took a member of their circle to call them out funnily...
Give it a rest. They weren't be hateful or malicious. Just a bit overenthusiastic and bad timing.
Posting a video from your mansion whilst being out of work, is a little different to not knowing where your next meal is coming from because your workplace is closed.
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When they sang this all I imagined was they get to be stuck at home in a mansion for a year
Honestly I didn't find this as bad as most people did. Sure I rolled my eyes but didn't think celebs needed to be cancelled for it. In the past, celebs have gotten together to sing songs for Live Aid and Live 8 as well. This was just done with phone cameras and in everyone's houses and not in studios like the Live Aid one.
The guy to the right should have imagined himself in mirror before lecturing the public
dude...that's Will Ferrell...that's on purpose.
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Let’s profess to open our hearts to the peasants, only on video, mind you
Another reason I believe in Jesus: because I He spared me from this
He spared me from having 747 fuselage dropped on my head from 30,000 ft. 🤣
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Yeah, this isn't blame on the celebrities. It moved me to tears, and caused me to feel a oneness. I just don't look at rich people and celebrities as special.
There was a diet product called "Ayds" before the sound-alike disease. Not at all a blunder, but an unforeseeable, unrecoverable disaster.
I still remember when Dr. Pepper thought they could a) market a specifically 10 calorie soda and b) do so with the slogan "It's Not For Women"
I mean this was 2011, the idea of feminism and antisexism was by no means obscure or fringe. The whole marketing campaign was so bizarre I wonder how on earth a large marketing team looked at blatant, unapologetic sexism and went "yeah sounds great this will sell us lots of soda for sure"
Nestle were at it in the UK, with a chocolate bar - "The Yorkie bar is famous in the UK for its former tag line: "It's not for girls." Nestlé first launched the slogans "Don't feed the birds," "Not available in pink," and "King size not queen size" in 2002" The chocolate had an icon of a woman, like on a toilet door, crossed out, on the packaging.
[U.S. Army tweets, "How has serving impacted you."](https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/727254720/a-u-s-army-tweet-asking-how-has-serving-impacted-you-got-an-agonizing-response). I actually learned about this one watching it unfold in real time on Reddit.
One of the movie directors for the Flash movie basically said " This movie will be so AMAZING you'll forget about all the things Ezra Miller did."
Gillette's toxic masculinity commercial. They lost over 8 billion dollars because they directly attacked their target audience. Good idea
Great idea actually. Maybe not commercially, but making a big statement like that, taking responsibility by using your huge coverage in media, to spread a message of change and respect, absolutely brilliant. It didn't "attack" men, certainly not all men. It called them to action, to hold each other accountable, to teach their boys to be kind humans. If you felt attacked by this, you might have been part of the problem, you might have been the one they were calling to change and reflect. - Which doesn't mean you were a bad person, just that there was still an opportunity to grow!
James Corden thinking that doing an AMA on Reddit would go any other way than it did
Note: this post originally had 69 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Would be cool if some of them had explainations instead of just links
Agreed! The links were useful for the posts that explained the story. The interesting ones I followed and now have a couple of rabbit holes to follow. But the posts with just the link and title I ignored. Obviously they weren’t intended to peak my interest. :)
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Know you used to absolutely OWN the home computer market? Commodore. Then they ditched their own awesome next-generation computer in favor of buying up and selling to America, "Amiga" computers. They were great, but they offered no compatibility to billions of dollars of equipment Commodore customers had bought, so they basically swapped their own world-dominating brand for someone else's, and lost all customer trust in the meanwhile.
Commodore 64 was my very first computer. Never actually knew what happened to the company.
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Betty Crocker once had a TV ad (pre-internet) for a new time-saving dessert product, where the family is talking and the mom (who works full-time) says the product is "for moms like me, who have a life". Apparently someone realized that insulting every stay-at-home mom was not a good idea, and the next time I saw the ad, it was "for moms like me, who leave it to Betty." I can't imagine the blowback they'd have gotten if social media was around back then.
Was it those boxes where you did the cake right in the pan without using a bowl?
Load More Replies... Anheuser Busch and Target? We are currently witnessing two massive PR disasters in real time and they aren't even going to mention them?
Target tried to come to Canada. They lasted a year, then went back home in the USA. Bad PR and bad management, not offering what Canadians wanted (i.e. good prices and quality).
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There was an advertising campaign for a brand name hemorrhoid cream which featured Johnny Cash singing Ring of Fire. Clever in a horrible way!
A very recent PR disaster? DeSantis's announcement of his entry into the presidential race. First, a strange "interview" on Twitter that was largely incomprehensible. Second, a bizarre video in which Elon Musk is on the screen about 80% of the time instead of DeSantis,
Don't waste your time trying to read this list, it doesn't load all the way. With the censorship, duplicate posts and just general shîïtiness of this site, I wonder why people even try to come here anymore.
Yeah, it suddeny changed from 69 entries to 30 entries whole I was in the list. I restarted the app and 30 entries had suddeny bern truncated.
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Unpopular opinion but I really dislike snarky corporate Twitters like Wendy's and stuff. I know everyone freaking loves them and thinks it's a huge PR win, but if you gotta throw shade and put down your rivals to get interest then imo you're doing it wrong. Your product should speak for itself. It just feels gimmicky and cringe to me.
Does anyone else remember when a school of higher learning in Texas was ALMOST named the "Sam Houston Institute of Technology"? Somebody figured out that the acronym for their football team just wouldn't fly. Do the math.
Coming next : Vinted stopping PayPal payment on their site. And one about Toyota in the past, in France : the Toyota MR2 ( in French, it sounds like ''Et merdeuh'' meaning ''F..k it'')
Are we just ignoring the elephant in the room here…Budweiser, target??? Odd timing in this post.
They are ignoring Budweiser and Target because Bored Panda is left leaning and don't agree that those were disasters. I'm surprised Gillette was included. And read the responses under it..
Load More Replies... Would be cool if some of them had explainations instead of just links
Agreed! The links were useful for the posts that explained the story. The interesting ones I followed and now have a couple of rabbit holes to follow. But the posts with just the link and title I ignored. Obviously they weren’t intended to peak my interest. :)
Load More Replies... Know you used to absolutely OWN the home computer market? Commodore. Then they ditched their own awesome next-generation computer in favor of buying up and selling to America, "Amiga" computers. They were great, but they offered no compatibility to billions of dollars of equipment Commodore customers had bought, so they basically swapped their own world-dominating brand for someone else's, and lost all customer trust in the meanwhile.
Commodore 64 was my very first computer. Never actually knew what happened to the company.
Load More Replies... Betty Crocker once had a TV ad (pre-internet) for a new time-saving dessert product, where the family is talking and the mom (who works full-time) says the product is "for moms like me, who have a life". Apparently someone realized that insulting every stay-at-home mom was not a good idea, and the next time I saw the ad, it was "for moms like me, who leave it to Betty." I can't imagine the blowback they'd have gotten if social media was around back then.
Was it those boxes where you did the cake right in the pan without using a bowl?
Load More Replies... Anheuser Busch and Target? We are currently witnessing two massive PR disasters in real time and they aren't even going to mention them?
Target tried to come to Canada. They lasted a year, then went back home in the USA. Bad PR and bad management, not offering what Canadians wanted (i.e. good prices and quality).
Load More Replies... There was an advertising campaign for a brand name hemorrhoid cream which featured Johnny Cash singing Ring of Fire. Clever in a horrible way!
A very recent PR disaster? DeSantis's announcement of his entry into the presidential race. First, a strange "interview" on Twitter that was largely incomprehensible. Second, a bizarre video in which Elon Musk is on the screen about 80% of the time instead of DeSantis,
Don't waste your time trying to read this list, it doesn't load all the way. With the censorship, duplicate posts and just general shîïtiness of this site, I wonder why people even try to come here anymore.
Yeah, it suddeny changed from 69 entries to 30 entries whole I was in the list. I restarted the app and 30 entries had suddeny bern truncated.
Load More Replies... Unpopular opinion but I really dislike snarky corporate Twitters like Wendy's and stuff. I know everyone freaking loves them and thinks it's a huge PR win, but if you gotta throw shade and put down your rivals to get interest then imo you're doing it wrong. Your product should speak for itself. It just feels gimmicky and cringe to me.
Does anyone else remember when a school of higher learning in Texas was ALMOST named the "Sam Houston Institute of Technology"? Somebody figured out that the acronym for their football team just wouldn't fly. Do the math.
Coming next : Vinted stopping PayPal payment on their site. And one about Toyota in the past, in France : the Toyota MR2 ( in French, it sounds like ''Et merdeuh'' meaning ''F..k it'')
Are we just ignoring the elephant in the room here…Budweiser, target??? Odd timing in this post.
They are ignoring Budweiser and Target because Bored Panda is left leaning and don't agree that those were disasters. I'm surprised Gillette was included. And read the responses under it..
Load More Replies...