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For many of us, this is a holiday week – the lead-up to Thanksgiving. A time to give thanks (hence the name), spend time with family (away from work!) and consume large amounts of TURKEY!

This week’s post will be short and sweet – as I know many of you are scrambling to fit a week’s worth of work into a couple of days!

Give this VERY short song by the Rolling Stones (under 2 min!) a listen as we see what the experts are saying this week.

Marketing Turkeys

We’re all aware of the Bud Light marketing fiasco from earlier this year – let’s take a quick look at some other marketing and ad campaigns that have backfired spectacularly over the years!

What about B2B? What are classic marketing mistakes in our realm… and how can we avoid them? Forbes is gonna tell you how it’s gonna be – their Top 5:

  1. Positioning is not a priority
  2. You follow the crowd
  3. You don’t give a say (early on) to those with sway
  4. You make it all about you
  5. There’s no cohesion between your marketing and sales teams

If you read these weekly blog posts (which I hope you do!), then you know the last one in this list is a real sticking point for me! So I guess this year, I’m grateful to know that this lesson will not fade away as others are also preaching the importance of sales and marketing alignment.

Musical Turkeys

According to Rolling Stone (the mag, not the band), here are the 50 worst decisions in music history! Fun list – give it a quick read if you can. Everything from Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing rollout to Kanye’s Taylor Swift ‘interruption’ and the Stones hiring the Hells Angels to run their security team.

Mistakes bigger than a Cadillac… and many of them show that sometimes hindsight really is 20/20. Do you have any examples of famous – or infamous – B2B marketing blunders?

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello!

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat