Which are the publicity stunts that went horribly wrong? Every company, regardless of size, have to deal with publicity and marketing. The reason is that publicity can help you sell your products or your services easier and get to the new customers. Unless your company is on the map, you can’t expect big success, therefore you cannot expect the profit and if you don’t have any profit, you can’t cover your expenses and you have to shut down. In order to prevent this kind of scenario, companies are investing a lot of money into marketing and publicity experts.
There is a saying that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”, but this can’t apply in every case. In some rare cases, the bad publicity can raise the rating of a company without any harm, but in most cases, it does not bring anything good. By wishing to get the attention of customers and clients, some companies are ready to go far. When you go down that road, it is easy to cross the line and go to the extremes. When you cross the line, it leads to failure which is hard to recover from. Some of the companies have made those unimpressive moves that ended up in publicity disaster, which chased away their customers and they lost their reputation.
If you are interested in marketing and publicity facts and what are the companies that made bad judgments, we suggest that you read Insider Monkey’s interesting article 5 Publicity Stunts That Went Horribly Wrong. At the 5th place on the list are Lifelock’s Persistent PR Failures. Lifelock Inc is an identity theft protection company. They came up with the idea of putting CEO Todd Davis’ social security number on the company’s website and billboards and dared anyone to try and steal it, in order to show how good are the services they provide. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but if you put the hackers in front of a challenge, they will take it and they will break anything you put in front of them. So, this was the case when they succeeded several times. In the end, the company had to pay $12 million settlement for deceiving their customers. To find out the rest of this list, just click on the link above.
