Ooops! Why This DIDN’T Work

After all, we’re talking about enormous companies with enormous marketing budgets. Teams of writers. Mulitple social media strategists. PR departments. Executives. Agencies. Lawyers. CEOs.

Surely it would be difficult to find truly spectacular examples of WHAT DIDN’T WORK??

Friends. It was not difficult. Not even a little bit. 😂 I have several for you to read about… one gets personal.

And somewhere along the way, I realized this isn’t an article about bad commercials.

It is about something MUCH bigger: Your marketing doesn’t end when you hit POST.

• It’s what happens when people answer back.

• It’s how you handle criticism. (always address criticism, not trolls, mind you!)

• It’s what your CEO says.

• It’s whether you listen when your customers tell you something.

• It’s how you apologize when you’re wrong.

And maybe most importantly:

Do you know what you and your company stands for? And are you actually prepared to stand behind those values when it becomes uncomfortable?

Good Good Golf created an ad for its co-branded Callaway driver in which Garrett Clark sees Alexis Miestowski reaching for his driver, runs toward her, shoves her to the ground, stands over her and warns her not to touch his driver.

WTAH?! I gasped when I saw this. I thought people were exaggerating.

This went through production. It went through approvals.

Callaway has acknowledged that it approved the ad before it was posted. 🤦🏻‍♀️

The explanation was that it was supposed to parody the horror film Obsession. 😳

Which brings us immediately to Marketing Lesson #1:

Intent does not magically erase impact.

The backlash came quickly. The video disappeared. Good Good apologized. Callaway apologized.

And then the response to the response became its own problem.

PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp publicly called Good Good’s initial response “disappointing,” “a bit defensive and late.”

Both CEOs eventually issued stronger responses. Good Good announced it would donate proceeds from the driver campaign to an organization supporting women. Callaway CEO Chip Brewer acknowledged that the approval should never have happened and said the company was reviewing how the video got through its processes.

But by then, this wasn’t just a bad-ad story anymore.

As of August 26, actual business consequences are appearing.

Golf Channel postponed the premiere of Big Break x Good Good until September 1st after a sponsor requested that its branding be removed from the show.

Golf Galaxy, which had previously been identified as the presenting sponsor, disappeared from subsequent promotion.

Good Good products also disappeared from Golf Galaxy and Dick’s Sporting Goods websites, although Dick’s/Golf Galaxy has not publicly confirmed why.

And here’s another part marketers should pay attention to:

Women are one of golf’s most important growth markets.

There were 7.9 million female on-course golfers in the United States in 2024, and women accounted for nearly 60% of golf’s net participant growth since 2019. UMMMMMM whoa, who knew? Guess they should have, hm? Just thinking out loud.

So somewhere during all those meetings and approvals, did anyone ask: How might the people we’re actively trying to welcome into this sport feel about this?

Because going viral is not automatically a marketing win.

Sometimes everybody is talking about you because you created something extraordinary.

Sometimes everybody is talking about you because they’re collectively asking: WHO (the hell) APPROVED THIS?

Those are not the same thing.

This one should have been easy.

Comedian Deric Cahill bought a Lovesac sectional.

It arrived in 24 boxes and he says it took about five hours to assemble.

So, being a comedian, he made a hilarious video about the experience and called it “corporate terrorism.”

His followers piled into the comments with their own assembly stories.

Now imagine you’re Lovesac…

People are talking about your product.

They’re telling you exactly where they’re experiencing friction.

They’re even discussing whether they’d PAY for professional assembly.

❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿HELLO, FREE MARKET RESEARCH.⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀

You could join the joke.

You could acknowledge that assembly is a beast.

You could offer assembly.

You could make a hilarious tutorial.

You could listen. (what a concept)

Instead, Lovesac CEO Shawn Nelson responded with jokes about Cahill needing small floral gardening gloves.

Then the company’s account posted another video mocking the idea of a grown man needing gloves to put together a couch, accompanied by: “the feminine urge to provide the masculine energy.”

Oh. No.

No no no.

And THIS is where I think the actual marketing failure happened.

Cahill’s original video wasn’t necessarily a crisis.

Lovesac’s response? Absolutely turned it into one.

The company tried to explain that it was just having fun.

But by then, the conversation had shifted from:

“Wow, this couch is a nightmare to assemble.”

to:

“Why is this expensive furniture company making fun of a customer?”

Customers are going to complain.

Sometimes they’ll be right, wrong, exaggerate, be funny.

Sometimes their funny complaint will get hundreds of thousands of views.

You don’t have to grovel every time someone criticizes you.

But you DO need to understand the difference between:

laughing WITH your customer and making your customer the punchline.

Especially when that customer just spent thousands of dollars with you.

I had to share this because this one bothers me personally.

I’m going to tread lightly and separate what we know from how I feel about it.

Hayden Panettiere represented Neutrogena for roughly a decade.

She later said that after she publicly discussed experiencing postpartum depression in 2015, Neutrogena sought to end its relationship with her under a morality clause. Her representative fought the termination, but the relationship ultimately wasn’t renewed.

Hayden also said nobody from the company reached out to support her during that extraordinarily difficult period.

But here’s an important part of this story:

We didn’t learn this after Hayden died.

Hayden wrote about the Neutrogena relationship in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which was published May 19, 2026.

She also talked about it publicly while promoting the book.

The story was out there.

Neutrogena could have addressed it then. They didn’t.

After Hayden died on August 16 and her comments began circulating again, the backlash grew.

Four days later, Neutrogena released a statement acknowledging that it had made Hayden “feel unsupported during a very difficult time” and announced plans for a significant investment in women’s health, including postpartum-depression support.

Neutrogena has said it waited after Hayden’s death to respond out of respect for her family.

My question is: Why did it take her death at all? Feels a bit like virtue signaling to me.

The memoir had been published three months earlier.

She talked about the experience publicly.

There was an opportunity to say something while Hayden was here to hear it.

That is the part I personally can’t get past.

And this is where I want to make it clear that I’m speaking as Karen the consumer, not making a claim about Neutrogena’s responsibility for Hayden’s health, struggles or death.

I simply have feelings about this.

Personally, I will not be buying any more Neutrogena products.

Other consumers can read what happened, read Neutrogena’s response and make their own decision.

But there’s an enormous marketing lesson here.

Neutrogena is a company whose business has been built substantially around women.

As shared above, they released a statement about “we did not support Hayden” blah blah. But it was too little, too late. Not only that, they turned off comments on their “so-called” support statement. SRSLY??

What do values mean when living them is inconvenient?

Because your brand values or mission statements aren’t just pretty words you put on your website.

They aren’t your Women’s History Month graphic, you put up once a year.

They aren’t an inspirational quote on Instagram once in a while.

Your values become visible when they’re inconvenient.

And that’s something every single one of us who runs a business should remember.

Let’s take a breath and laugh together a little

THE BITE SEEN AROUND THE WORLD…

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski filmed himself trying the new Big Arch burger.

This should have been the easiest marketing assignment in history.

Eat burger. Enjoy burger. Tell us burger is good.

Instead, he repeatedly referred to the burger as a “product,” appeared hilariously tentative about eating the enormous thing, and took a bite that did not scream: GET THIS DELICIOUSNESS INTO MY MOUTH.

The internet noticed, Ohhhhh, did the internet notice.

In case you forgot here it is along with a few fabulous responses from other burger joints…

The memes were spectacular.

And then McDonald’s competitors smelled an opportunity.

Executives from Burger King and Wendy’s enthusiastically ate their own burgers.

Costco’s CEO eventually got involved and absolutely went to town on a $1.50 hot dog. 😂

Which gives us another marketing lesson:

If you create an opening, somebody else may walk directly through it.

But McDonald’s gives us a fascinating twist.

Because this supposedly terrible piece of content generated an estimated 5.8 BILLION impressions in a single day.

So... Was it actually a failure? Maybe. Maybe not.

The execution was awkward. The internet made fun of it.

Competitors used it against McDonald’s.

But millions of impressions later, we’re STILL talking about the Big Arch.

Which leads us to a question I think marketers need to ask much more often: What are we actually measuring?

• Viral doesn’t automatically mean effective.

• Views don’t automatically mean customers.

• Comments don’t automatically mean sales.

• Embarrassment doesn’t necessarily mean failure.

Sometimes the internet hands you a moment you never intended to create.

The question becomes: What do you do with it?

And that’s what these four wildly different stories have in common.

Your marketing doesn’t stop when the post hits.

It doesn’t stop when the Reel posts.

It doesn’t stop when you hit SEND in the DMs.

That’s when another kind of marketing begins.

• Your comments are marketing.

• Your replies are marketing.

• Your customer service is marketing.

• Your CEO’s TikTok is marketing.

• Your apology is marketing.

• Your silence is marketing. (this one is nuanced)

• Turning off the comments is marketing.

• How you behave when you’re wrong is marketing.

And how you behave when you believe you’re RIGHT? That’s marketing too.

Which brings me back to something I think every small business, creator and personal brand needs to figure out BEFORE the internet comes knocking:

Not what sounds good in your bio.

What do you actually stand for?

Because eventually somebody will challenge it.

A customer will complain. A post will flop. Someone will misunderstand you. Someone will disagree with you.

And yes, eventually you may screw something up.

I will. You will.

Every company in this article will again.

You don’t need to be perfect.

But you do need to know:

What are our values?

What are we willing to apologize for?

What aren’t we willing to apologize for?

When do we listen?

When do we fix something?

When do we respectfully stand our ground?

And what happens when the audience answers back?

Because social media isn’t broadcasting. It’s a conversation.

And next week, we’re flipping this entire conversation around and looking at what DOES work for us small(er) brands and businesses.

Because you don’t need a billion-dollar marketing budget to get this right.

And after this week’s examples, I’m starting to think having fourteen fewer approval meetings might actually be an advantage.😜🦋

This is one of the Why This Worked mini-series, an occasional series where I dig into marketing, advertising and social media that made us stop, notice, remember and maybe even buy, to figure out what the rest of us can learn from it and how to do it ourselves.

And ummmmm YES! There will also be the occasional Oops: Why This DIDN’T Work. Because sometimes the marketing lessons that cost somebody else millions are the most fun ones to study. 😜