6 Advertising Campaigns That Actually Hurt Sales

6 Advertising Campaigns That Actually Hurt Sales6 Advertising Campaigns That Actually Hurt SalesAdvertising has a number of jobs to do. It has to create awareness about a product, service, or brand. It can also add value to a product, making it more desirable. For instance, there is very little difference between the three major light beer brands, Coors Light, Miller Light, and Bud Light, as far as flavor goes. Consumers are buying the brand, which is built from advertising. And advertising also should inform. Heres what this product or service does, and does well.But by far the greatest role advertising plays is to increase schlussverkauf. No advertising agency would ever pitch a campaign that knowingly hurt sales, or did not move the sales curve in the right direction. It would be suicide. However, ad campaigns fail all the time. And sometimesthey fail hard. Here are six of the biggest advertising fails that actually made the sales figures drop. 01Kenyan Runner Just For Feet YouTu beA quick Google search for California Raisins yields almost 1.5 million results. Clearly, they had an impact and people remember them. The ads took some classic Motown and rock hits, and paired them with some Emmy-award winning stop motion animation. They even had a Billboard Hot 100 hit. And if you saw Straight Outta Compton recently, they were mentioned in that movie. Whats not to love, right? Well, The California Raisin Board had plenty of reasons to grumble.The first issue was that the funky little raisin characters were not exactly attractive. A wrinkly rabbit dropping with arms and legs is hardly a great way to advertise a food product. But the bigger issue was that the characters and songs overshadowed the actual product. People were digging the ads, and loving the music and the charm of it all. But, they did not go out in droves and buy boxes of raisins. The ads didnt really do anything to inform people about the uses of raisins, the nutritional benefit, or anything else. I nstead, people just took away some cute singing raisin creatures and bought their records.The campaign proved to be popular, and sales did increase slightly while the campaign ran. But, the price to do the production was exorbitant, costing the CRB almost twice their annual earnings. And when the ads were pulled from the air, sales actually dropped. Needless to say, this is another case of nice ad, shame about the results.