My 15 Minutes of Fame: Crowdsourcing Gone Wrong: How Brands Can Avoid Messy Marketing Mistakes

We've all heard about the wisdom of crowds, with Wikipedia and even entire industry of television voting shows attempting to prove the paradigm.

By involving their audience to make them feel like their input is listened to, a brand can build advocates and perhaps come up with ideas they wouldn't have had on their own.

However, it doesn't always go right.

Unsuspecting marketers who blindly attempt to take advantage of the crowds may find themselves causing more issues than benefits for their brands.

The Wit of Crowdsourcing

Dinna dinna dinna dinna, dinna dinna dinna dinna Durex

Earlier this year Durex decided to offer a new service where their condoms would be sent directly to couples in need in cities across the world, either on the web or using an app. Their marketing team decided that the best way to kick this campaign off was to ask their users to pick the first city this would launch in.

Unfortunately for them they didn't think ahead and left it open for any city to be submitted. Thanks to the wit of the crowds, this resulted in Kuala Lumpur ending in second place, and the predominantly conservative, Muslim, although amusingly named, city of Batman, Turkey.

Durex closed the campaign down without offering the service anywhere, let alone in Batman.

As it was in those prehistoric, pre-Internet days, the votes were collected via telephone. Music magazine NME heard about it and asked their readers to vote for one specific Bowie song – "The Laughing Gnome". The vote was scrapped with that song in the lead.

(The author would like to apologize for getting that stuck in your head).

D'oh the Dew

Last August Mountain Dew was ready to launch an Apple version and decided to get the crowd to share their wisdom by asking them to name this new variant. As you'd expect, the crowd decided to show their wit instead, by submitting and voting up names that wouldn't be allowed anywhere near a bottle of soda.