We’ve been talking a lot about marketing lately, and while doing so, spending nearly as much if not just as much time dancing around what a bloody pain it is to discuss most of it. But, when it comes to marketing mistakes, that’s a little easier to talk about. Defining a Mistake: Well, let’s define this first. A marketing mistake would be any misuse of logic in planning and executing a marketing campaign which results in abject failure and/or a blundering or bad reputation. No Specificity: I don’t really want to point out any specific blunders by companies in this, and just describe different general types of major mistake that can happen. We’ll be looking at branding mistakes, mishandled internet presence, poor advertising and marketing practices and general foibles here. This isn’t a challenge to discuss, but man, so much can go wrong, so many marketing mistakes happen, it’s difficult to condense it into a small set like this. Advertising Errors: #1 – Abuse of Commercial Interruption The quickest way to annoy customers into hating you is to misuse commercial interruptions. Part of the onus of this falls on the media feed providers to keep breaks short and infrequent. But, when an obnoxious commercial comes out, and it’s way overplayed and/or way too long, customers become sick of hearing of it. #2 – Spam Email marketing isn’t the same thing as spam, and spam is a general term here. I don’t just mean junk email. I mean all the assorted refuse companies toss at us that go right into the rubbish bins, too. Things like flyers, junk mail and other such nuisances as well. They even stoop so low as to burn SMS credits on mobile plans with spam texts, and cost money in toner or ink by faxing garbage as well. No. Bad! Branding Errors: #3 – Knock Offs Ok, this is a bit derisive in many cases, but it’s easy to be too much like the competition, and be obvious in doing it. Now, being in the same vein but also strongly differentiating yourself is just fine though. #4 – Retreading Old Ground This is a problem, mostly in rejuvenating established campaigns. Not treading new ground and showing signs of life, you can stagnate and become background noise to the people you’re trying to reach. So, make sure you bring something new to the table even if it’s just something in your advertising and marketing, and not the product or service. You don’t want them to be so used to you that they don’t notice you anymore. #5 – Infamy Infamy is something that some companies try to achieve now. Controversy or absurd public stunts that don’t earn admiration nor disdain but apprehension and curiosity are common. Don’t do this unless you’re desperate or really, really confident. Because it can go wrong, and infamy doesn’t work for all demographics either. So, this is usually a major foible, and not a clever and brassy move, in reality. Conclusion: Such marketing mistakes as these are common, and most of them are fairly easy to fix if you noticed having made one of these mistakes in retrospect. But, if you’ve made the last mistake on the list, you might be screwed sadly.