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
The Gap Year that Almost Became a Career Gap
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Marketing professionals aren't immune to making classic business mistakes, especially when personal projects cloud professional judgment. Our guest Katie Tucker, a Customer Insight Strategist, and Author of Do Penguins Eat Peaches, shares how her family gap year adventure led her to create a course without proper market validation, only to be unexpectedly saved by the COVID pandemic's timely intervention.
- World tour with family generated Instagram following and many questions about how to plan family gap years
- Created a comprehensive course teaching practical and psychological preparation for family travel
- Secured impressive media coverage in The Times money section
- Failed to properly validate the business idea beyond supportive friends and family
- COVID pandemic intervened before full launch, preventing potential business failure
- Working in market research didn't prevent making the same mistakes she warns clients about
- Personal connection to the project made objective assessment more difficult
- Sometimes you need to make mistakes to learn valuable business lessons
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Introduction to Marketing Mistakes
Speaker 0This show's all about mistakes in the world of marketing . So do you want to tell a little bit of us ? I mean , I know it's in the book , so people will have to buy it , but do you want to give us a little bit of an insight into how
Family Gap Year Journey
Speaker 0that came about ? Yeah , so , as I said , like I went on this big world tour with my family . We did a family gap year and during that time , I did build up a following on social media and , you know , not quite knowing where it was going to go , but I thought , ok , this is something that's quite out of the ordinary to do as a family . So I was sharing it , you know , and I was getting quite good traction on Instagram . People were like , oh , my God , I'd love to do that with my family . How did you do it ? There was lots of questions .
The Course Creation Mistake
Speaker 0So when I came back , I thought , wow , I've got , I know how to do this because I've just done it with two kids . Um , I think , uh , I could maybe do a course . Um , and you know , at the time there was a lot of people doing like everyone was doing a course . So I thought , okay , I'll do a course and teaching people how to like prepare not just uh , from the practicalities but also like , um , mentally , and you know , because it's not all , you know , flying unicorns when you travel the world with two kids . So I really wanted to do something quite uh , practical . So I , you know , I started writing um , you know the the course and different , different modules . I wrote in some people that I'd met along the way , other families , for like videos and testimonials and um , and in the back of my mind I was probably not listening to the voice that was saying have you checked , katie ? You know , and I , you know I'm in this field and you know , when it's so close to you , I think it's even harder sometimes to say , um , yeah , it becomes quite personal . I was like , of course , yeah , I know what I'm talking about .
Speaker 0Um managed to get some media coverage , as you said , uh , in the
How COVID Became a Blessing
Speaker 0I think it's like the front page of the money section of the times um , about how we did it , how we financed it , with a link at the bottom , you know , to find out more about the course , which is great , and that's great , which is fantastic . Yeah , but the one thing I didn't do is I did , you know , I asked the classic mistake , like friends , family and friendly people , whether they thought it was a good idea . Um , and obviously you know I was desperate for this to work . I just quit , you know , my job . I'd just come back from this trip . What I was thinking what am I going to do , um , next ? And so I've . You know it had to work .
Speaker 0Yeah , uh , and , as I say in the book , like COVID saved me , because COVID put an end to all travel plans , let alone , you know , family travel plan , and so I had to stop . You know I had to like okay , I have to do something else , because obviously , you know , I don't know when people are going to travel again , but it was a really good . Yeah , I like sharing it because I think people think that you know people like myself who work in the research industry you know , in product and help people around custom discovery are immune to some of the things that go on in your head when you're trying to like do something for yourself and you're trying to like do something for yourself , um , and you're not
Learning from Failure
Speaker 0. You know you have to check in with yourself and , as I said , like Covid put an end to everything . And I always say , yeah , covid saved me on that one . But it was a good learning and you know , sometimes you have to make a big mistake like that to , like you know , not make , not make it again .
