Marketing Mistake that cost LIFELOCK Millions | Swareena Aggarwal
What happens when aggressive marketing meets an incompetent product?
The biggest marketing fails of all time.
Just to give you some reference, LifeLock is basically a tool that protects you against online identity theft.
Now let’s understand what actually happened.
The company was very new and eager to prove itself. The CEO, Todd Davis came up with a bold and aggressive idea for the marketing campaign.
The idea was to…..
(Wait for it)
.
.
His idea was to print his Social Security Number on all the marketing and promotional materials giving an open challenge to all the hackers. The employees in the company were hesitant to go on with this but their opinions were ultimately ignored.
Needless to say, it didn’t work out.
The Marketing Mishap
What happened after this campaign is chuckle-worthy and sad at the same time.
Prompted by this open challenge given by the CEO the hackers all over the country got on their screens and managed to hack Todd Davis’s account 13 times. Loans were taken on his name illegally.
The price they paid.. (Quite Literally)
As you might have guessed the CEO himself lost millions.
However, this was not the end of it.
This news spread like a wildfire and every paper, news channel, magazine and online portal covered this. As proved by the campaign the product was now declared to be a Hoax and FTC lawsuits were filed against the company.
As per the FTC’s own words:
“Lifelock falsely claimed it protected consumers’ identity 24/7/365 by providing alerts ‘as soon as it received any indication there was a problem.”
The company was hit with multimillion-dollar fines for false advertising.
Was this the end of it?
No.
Following this debacle Lifelock was given some time to get its product up to the mark. This would have the saving grace. But, the company faltered to pay the initial fine. This in turn led to an investigation open up.
The investigation dug even deeper and found out that the company failed to meet the basic product guideline. This meant a 100 million dollar fine.
What exactly went wrong?
Well apart from negligence to pay fine the biggest mistake was-
Overestimating the Quality and performance of the product.
The lesson you can learn.
The marketing campaign itself was Genius. It was attention-grabbing, it was bold but it missed the mark because the promise didn’t match what was being delivered.
Whenever we market any product the feisty thing to keep in mind is the message you are giving away. If your message doesn’t match what is actually being given, you are in trouble.
So proper knowledge and testing of your product is a must and having a solid product and service that is marketing from the base.
Your marketing message should always match the actual value you deliver with your products and service. Do proper research on your products and maybe listen to marketing professionals!
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Originally published at https://swareenaaggarwal.com on July 15, 2021.