I'm wondering if anyone can share some companies that fell short in their marketing efforts, especially companies that might be more well known. How did they fall short? What can we learn? I tend to believe that I learn from others, and hearing of other failures can only help me avoid the obstacles.
From a marketing standpoint I see mistakes quite commonly from mid-size companies, and occasionally large companies. The biggest company I could site for you is Yellow Book. Plain and simple, Yellow Book sucks. More particularly, YellowBook.com sucks. Their online counterpart to the print directory is useless. The Yellow Book search is the worst I've seen in a directory. I actually applied there to perform SEO, and went through several hours of interviews. The director of marketing was clueless as to what web marketing required. At one point he asked me the difference between SEO and SEM - at first I thought it was an interview question, but I soon figured out that we were having a consulting session. He truly didn't know! By the time that interview was over, I was ready to leave and never look back. Absolutely awful. Even their human resources (melinda something was her name) was inept and didn't respond timely at all. The only large reach program they tried was that annoying commercial with Kill Bill. Crude and weak in every way. I also applied for Progressive Business Publications (PBP). They were a direct email company that really turned out to be nothing more than spammers. That's a bad marketing plan no matter how you slice it.