The Marketing Rescue Podcast

By: Chad Childress & Nico Coetzee
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  • Summary

  • The Marketing Rescue podcast is a weekly show that covers the most epic brand failures and comebacks throughout history. Join hosts Nico Coetzee and Chad Childress as they talk about how some of your favorite brands came back from the brink of disaster, as well as some of the more sinister brand business you may have heard of, but don’t really know. We are here every week with the entire stories—the successes, the failures, and why they happened. You haven’t heard the stories told like this anywhere else and you won’t want to miss out.
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Economics Marketing
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Episodes
  • EP46: The Kindest Brand

    EP46: The Kindest Brand
    Feb 26 2021
    In this episode, the guys chat about the incredible legacy of Fred Rogers and how every time people tried to use his likeness or intellectual property for branding purposes it never ended well. Nico plays a guessing game with Chad that goes way beyond winners of an EGOT. Burger King: Mister Rodney Here is Mister Rogers in the first episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: Here is ‘Mister Rodney’ in Burger King’s 1984 commercial for their flame-broiled burgers:   Parodies aren’t uncommon in marketing. While it’s not unheard of for a parody to cross the line and be offensive enough that it gets taken down, it doesn't happen that often. Burger King’s 1984 ‘Mister Rodney’ ad is one of those parodies that got taken down - but not for being offensive. To understand why it was taken down, it might help if we know more about Fred McFeely Rogers. Mister Rogers - A Brief Overview Rogers earned his bachelor’s degree in music, worked in children’s television for a few years, returned to school to earn a bachelor’s degree in divinity, and became a Presbyterian minister before attending the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development. Rogers was not only educated on child development but he also began his 30-year long collaboration with child psychologist Margaret McFarland. From there, he was able to begin developing children’s shows that had value. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, ran for 33 years from 1968-2001. More than just childrens’ entertainment, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was critically acclaimed for focusing on children's emotional and physical concerns, such as death, sibling rivalry, school enrollment, and divorce. Why Burger King Dropped the CommercialOr it's half the reason. The other half is kindness. In the spring of 1984, Rogers started to receive “countless” phone calls from parents complaining about the commercial. Having seen the ad himself and taken issue with it, Fred Rogers contacted the Senior Vice President of Burger King, Don Dempsey. Many people who take offense to being parodied cite libel or copyright infringement, or lack of royalties.  But not Fred Rogers. He said, "To have someone who looks like me doing a commercial is very confusing for children.”Rogers didn’t threaten Burger King with any legal action. He simply called them and politely asked them to stop running the commercial. Rogers explained that "It's a real testimony to what fine things can occur when people of goodwill can talk to each other." No lawyers. No mess. No fuss. Just gentle, kind conversation. That’s the Mister Rogers way. Target and Mister Rogers A decade after his death, the Fred Rogers Company licensed “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” the theme song from Mister Rogers Neighborhood, to Target in 2013.  2013 Target ad.   William Isler, president of Fred Rogers Co, told The Globe and Mail  “when we were first approached by Target, we immediately felt very comfortable with the respect they had for Fred and his legacy. That is paramount to us.” Like Burger King in 1984, it's easy to understand why Target would want to use Rogers in their marketing. But why would the Fred Rogers Company license out the legacy of a man who was so outspoken in his stance against commercialization?   Google and Mister RogersIn 2018, Google launched an ad for the Google Pixel 3. Unlike the Target ad from five years earlier, rather than using a cover of one of Rogers’ songs, in Google’s commercial Rogers's own voice can be heard talking and singing about wonder. It seems there are two ways to view the ad: The first being that in Google’s defense, Mister Rogers always tried to instill a sense of wonder and intellectual curiosity in his audience members and Google hoped to do the same with the Pixel 3.  The second is that Rogers was also very clearly, explicitly, and publicly against not just advertisements aimed at children, but his voice and image being used to advertise to children.  Suzanne Masri,
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    27 mins
  • EP45: The Accepted Reality

    EP45: The Accepted Reality
    Feb 14 2021
    In this episode, the guys chat about how easy it is to go off target with data security and how people are so willing to give up their privacy for a good customer experience. Nico talks about why it's better to come out with problematic information quickly versus holding on to it until you have every detail down. Target got worse before they got better. While that may be unusual, what isn't unusual is that - like most brands, products, and people - no matter what order they did it in, Target still had to fail before they got better. Prior to the early 2010s Target seemed to be making consistent but more or less uneventful accomplishments. After 2013, however, is a different story. Today’s topic - Target data breach in 2010s. What Happened then? Target Canada In 2013, two things happened that caused Target to be subject to a brief and mortifying downfall. One of those things happened to Target while the other was an experiment gone wrong on their end. The smaller and first to happen of those two is Target Canada. In March, 2013, Target opened its first Canadian stores. Sadly, they weren’t meant to last. The expansion into Canada presented Target with a host of problems. The most notable obstacle might be the supply chain issues that resulted in stores with aisles of empty shelves and higher-than-expected retail prices.  On January 15, 2015, Target announced that all 133 of its Canadian outlets would be closed and liquidated by the end of the year. The failure of Target Canada certainly didn't help Target by any means. But this failure wouldn’t have hurt them as badly as it did if it weren’t for the timing of their second failure - the one that happened to them. Data Breach Had Target’s 2013 data breach not happened eight months after the company launched its soon-to-be-short-lived subsidiary, it might not have felt like a second punch to the face. On November 27th, 2013, Target started experiencing a data breach. ‘Started to experience a data breach’ because the breach lasted for a total of 19 days - from November 27th (two days before Black Friday) to December 15th. Part of the kicker here is that the breach reportedly went on for 16 of those 19 days before it was even detected. It would be 20 more days after the discovery before Target would notify the public about the breach.Initially, Target believed around 40 million consumer credit and debit card information - including customer names, card number, expiration date, and CVV -  had been stolen. In one of their earliest statements, Target claimed consumer PIN data hadn’t been part of the breach.  On January 10th, 2014 Target had another announcement to make. They announced that an additional 70 million people had been affected by the breach - bringing the estimated total to about 110 million customers. That wasn’t the only thing Target had to add. They also had to inform the public that on top of credit card information, the stolen customer information included names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. Obviously, there’s a moral of the story here but there’s a technical takeaway too. The most effective way to learn from the latter might be to break down the attack. The anatomy of the attack on Target’s data consists of five different points:  preliminary surveycompromise of a third-party vendor or vendorsleveraging Target's vendor-portal accessgaining control of Target serversTarget's point of sale (POS) systems. Yahoo Data Breach After the breach was announced, the biggest public criticism of Target was that they didn't announce the breach sooner. For the customers whose personal information was stolen, that’s a fair criticism but, when looking at data breaches in the 2010s, it doesn’t give Target nearly enough credit. Target is not the only company to experience a data breach in the 2010s (or 2013 alone for that matter) but the 20 days they kept the breach under wraps pales in comparison to how long other com...
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    25 mins
  • EP44: The Government Agency Trying To Be Cool

    EP44: The Government Agency Trying To Be Cool
    Feb 7 2021
    In this episode, the guys get back to their regularly scheduled programming. Nico takes us back to a time when typefaces were a symbol of nationalism, and Chad talks about why its a good idea not to run a scam related to the CIA. Credit: Central Intelligence Agency https://www.cia.gov/Typefaces aren’t just related to art and advertising, they also have a long history with politics.  Think of Fraktur. Fraktur is a gothic font. It's also calligraphic meaning that rather than just being gothic it has a handwritten quality to it that makes it somehow both curvy and pointy at the same time. Fraktur arose in the 16th century and remained popular until the 18th century, at which point many European countries moved away from Fraktur in favor of the much easier to read Antiqua typeface (for example Times New Roman is technically Antiqua in style). Germany viewed Antiqua as a symbol of the classicist age and emerging cosmopolitanism in most of the European countries that had previously used Fraktur.  The Antiqua-Fraktur Dispute was such a big deal that two centuries later, it has its own Wikipedia page.  The Fraktur typefaces remained in use in Nazi Germany, and was represented as “true German script.” In fact, during World War II, German presses were “urged” to only use “German script,” meaning Fraktur. “Urged” because the Fraktur font was heavily associated with Nazi Germany. This association was partly, if not largely, because of the Bauhaus.  The Bauhaus is a German art school founded by German architect Walter Gropius after World War I in 1919. Bauhaus was founded on principles of how design could be used to serve people and transform society. The Bauhaus School led to the first concrete foundations of modern design. Additionally, its influence was not only limited to Germany. The revolutionary art movement not only helped create what is now known as modern design but shaped cityscapes and entire urban centers elsewhere in the world. The nationalist movement that soon developed into Nazi ideology in Germany considered Bauhaus to be a rejection of traditional German values.  On January 3, 1941, the Nazi Party ended this controversy by declaring Fraktur to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) before prohibiting it and switching to Antiqua.  German historian Albert Kapr has speculated that the regime viewed the hard-to-look-at-let-alone-read Fraktur as inhibiting communication in the occupied territories during World War II.  War took precedence over having a “German” font. What's Up With The Art History Lesson?  Today, when we see illegible fonts in advertisements, it's considered a marketing fail.  Which is essentially what happened with Germany. By insisting on using Fraktur for - give or take -  four hundred years, as a metaphor you could say Germany turned themselves into a bad billboard.  Whether you’re a company or a country, the lesson here is to embrace art, marketing, and the place where those two overlap.  On January 8th, 2021, the Central Intelligence Agency unveiled a new design for its website, CIA.gov. Not a big deal, right? Well… Apparently, it was.Or at least it was a big enough deal that the rebranding made news. Why? Same reason the Bauhaus did 100 years ago. Simply for breaking the status quo.  CIA.gov abandoned the formal signifiers of government authority: dense bureaucratic text, link directories, declarative headers, nothing too fancy CIA.gov is now set against a stark black background, offset by dots and lines that form topographical contours. There's pops of red, bold, white font, and a clear design theme. In other words, the CIA seems to have discovered graphic design and modern art. There are subtle hallmarks of modern web design, like the site’s animated scroll. The crisp lines and muted color palette suggest a minimalist branding strategy. Like with all things political, artistic, or both, the website has received a lot of mixed reactions. Online,
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    39 mins

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