Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the world’s leading irreverent podcast for senior marketers who are tired of the polished corporate b*llshit.
Join Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, founders of the award-winning Prohibition PR, as they sit down with industry leaders to dissect the career-ending f*ck-ups they’d rather forget. The show moves past any pretty vanity metrics to uncover the brutal, honest truths behind marketing disasters, from £30,000 SEO black holes and completely failed companies, to social media crises that went globally viral for all the wrong reasons.
We don't just celebrate the f*ck-ups; we extract the tactical blueprints you need to avoid them yourself. If you are a business owner, or a CMO looking for a competitive advantage that only comes from real-world experience, this is your weekly masterclass in resilience and strategy.
- Listen for: Raw stories from top brands, ex-McKinsey strategists, and industry disruptors.
- Learn from: The errors that cost thousands and the recoveries that saved careers.
- Get ahead by: Turning other people's nasty disasters into your unfair market advantage.
If you have a story to tell and would like to appear on the show, tell us your biggest marketing mistake and drop us a line.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Food Marketing Gaffe: My Culinary Embarrassment with Meena Patak
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Tamsin Daniel, a senior marketing professional and Head of Marketing at Firetree Chocolate, shares her embarrassing culinary f*ck up while supporting celebrity chef Meena Patak during a cooking show filmed in India.
What begins as an exciting opportunity quickly descends into chaos with illness and a fundamental misunderstanding about chickpeas. 🤣
• Becoming violently ill on day one after eating something unsuitable
• Responsibility for preparing ingredients for Mina's outdoor cooking demonstration
• Mina forced to improvise a new recipe when faced with rock-hard, unusable chickpeas
• Living down "Chickpea Gate" among colleagues
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Show introduction and premise
Speaker 1This show's about marketing , fuck-ups and mistakes . And have you got a mistake involving chickpeas ? I have , yeah , yeah , yeah , at least they're good for you , at least they're good for me . I knew nothing about chickpeas at the time . I have to . That's my starting point . So , yeah , trying to find it Well , thinking of a story that I could actually tell . We have so many people coming on the show going , I can't tell you the stories once . Once the cameras are off , the cameras
Trip to India with Mina Patak
Speaker 1are off .
Speaker 1Yeah , I am quite early in my my time at patax , I was given the opportunity to go with mina patak um to india . Which part of india was it ? Well , we did a bit of it . So we went to um chen , which used to be called Madras , now Chennai , and we went across to Kerala to sort of do the spice trail , so following the spices and how they come from the spice plantations down to the port at Cochin . And my job was to ensure that Meena had everything she needed . She was doing a cookery program , so we had a film crew come out from New Zealand to film this cookery show with her . And there was a point at which , at one of the hotels we were staying at beautiful place in the hills . They were going to be doing this open air cooking and it was my job to make sure all of the ingredients were there . Everyone knew how Mina needed to be doing this , this open air cooking , and it was my job to make sure all of the ingredients were there . Everyone knew what , how Mina needed to be supported . I was also there to sort of
Getting sick in India
Speaker 1support Mina generally .
Speaker 1My day one I ate something I should have done and was absolutely sick as a dog , I mean really ill and and I just hadn't prepared for that for a start . So I had , no , I had nothing with me . I didn't have anything to take . Thankfully mina did . She was , I think she was used to taking people out who got just you two there . Then , yeah , it was just us from patax . And then there was this early career experience , not , yeah , yeah , well , not so much the getting sick , no , that was horrific and I , so day one I was out of action completely . Day two , I was still having to run to the loo every now and again . It was pretty horrific , couldn't eat anything as well . So all this amazing food and I was not able to eat it . I had some poppadoms and that was about all I could stomach .
Speaker 1But then we got to the bit where we were going to do the filming , and one of the ingredients required to be on hand for Mina was
The chickpea cooking disaster
Speaker 1chickpeas . Now , I'd only ever seen chickpeas in a can . I thought that's how they came , never even occurred to me that they came in another way . And she got to all of this food laid out , all the ingredients laid out , and the chickpeas were rock hard because apparently they come in dried form . Who knew ?
Speaker 1I didn't , um , and of course the dish was impossible . She couldn't cook , um , because you , you need to soak them overnight . They're like 12 hours soaking time . It's not like you can even rush , it is it ? No , you couldn't rush . It was it for a dal then was it ? I can't . It was some sort of chickpea dish , but it was . It was like the main ingredient in this dish and all she .
Speaker 1She had all of the kitchen staff running around trying to . I mean , she had to think on her feet . She's an amazing cook , um , and she just came up with an alternative recipe . The kitchen staff were running off trying to find all the ingredients for this particular thing . Chickpeas knocking around .
Speaker 1There weren't any tins of chickpeas and I thought , you know , there was a bit of me that thought I could quite easily say it was their mistake because they'd misunderstood what I needed . But I was like , no , I have to , I really have to own up to this one , because I didn't want these poor kitchen staff to take the fall for me . So I did own up . What did Mina say ? Well , at that point she was quite frazzled because obviously trying to figure out what else . But the following day it was absolutely fine . It was absolutely fine . She's lovely . A bit of sweating , weren't you ? I was not in a nice way . The recovery from the sickness yeah , but somebody I can't remember who , somebody gifted me a pack of chickpeas after I got back , because they'd obviously
Owning up and aftermath
Speaker 1heard about the story . Yeah , and it took a while to live that one down . Chickpea gates , yeah , yeah .
