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
From Office to Remote: A Pandemic Pivot Gone Wrong
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Rich Mullholland, Founder of Missing Link and a presentation company leader, shares how his eloquence led to convincing himself of incorrect strategies that nearly cost him their business after the pandemic.
His decision to permanently close their unique office space following initial online success eliminated their word-of-mouth marketing engine and created significant challenges.
• Being skilled at persuasion can lead to convincing yourself of incorrect ideas
• During lockdown, the presentation company initially went to zero revenue
• By August, they achieved their best month in 18 months with no live events
• September became their best month in 24 years as presenters needed online training
• They permanently closed their unique office with distinctive features
• The office closure unknowingly destroyed their word-of-mouth marketing engine
• Staff became distributed across multiple locations, making office reopening difficult
• By the time they realised the mistake, they lacked the resources to create a new remarkable space
• The experience taught them about the importance of recognising when a pivot is just a "swinging door"
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Introducing the Biggest Career Mistake
Chris NortonSo we asked everybody on this show what's the biggest fuck up they've got in their career and what have they learned from it . So what have you got , rich being a brilliant , brilliant storyteller and presenter ? I'm sure you've got no fuck ups , right .
Rich MullhollandOh yeah , absolutely none . It's actually been a breeze . Life is so easy . I mean , the problem is , of course , that there's too many to list . One of the biggest problems , one of the biggest mistakes I've made and let me bring it back to what I was going to say to you but because I am quite an eloquent storyteller , I don't just sell audience , I sell
The Eloquent Storyteller's Dilemma
Rich Mullhollandmyself . So one of the biggest challenges facing people who are good at telling stories and persuading other people is that they actually are often very , very eloquent and simultaneously incorrect . But because I'm able to frame my argument in such a way that it's convincing to other people , I end up convincing myself . And I've made some really , really silly mistakes .
Rich MullhollandA big one for us was after lockdown
COVID Pivot and Office Closure
Rich Mullholland. So during lockdown , we have a presentation company . We did terribly . We went to revenue zero straight away , but actually by the end of the year , by August , we'd had our best month in 18 months with no live events . And September was our best month and at the time I think it was our 24-year history , and the reason was that everybody who thought they were great at presenting agreed that they were terrible at presenting online .
Rich MullhollandOvernight we started picking up lots and lots of international customers and we bet the farm on the fact that we could do all business online , everything . But then what happened ? And I was so convinced of this and I was appearing on podcasts and shows and advocating the idea that we should never go back to the office again , never do any of these things , and I had convinced myself so much . But then what happened is , slowly but surely , people did want to start interacting again . They did go back to things I was still doing lots of online keynotes , as opposed to traveling halfway around the world to do them and in fact , we never reopened our office , which I mean . We had such a . We had such a cool thing going we gave away free sex toys to all the ladies and they could take them in the , as I said , proving the O in preso . In our ladies toilets . We had a shooting range . We had so much going on and we kept it all closed because we thought that we were smarter and better than that and it was such a fuck up . I had no idea .
Rich MullhollandWhen you do a branding exercise and , let's be honest , that's all of our office was right . Our office was a campaign . People always thought , oh , you're doing it for your staff . The novelty of cool offices wears off for people working in those offices . After a month you know Then it's just work , it's actually for the other people . But sometimes what happens is you create a brand position in the market . You take it so much for granted that you forget that it is effective . You then move away from that brand position and only then do you see the fallout of it , which was our word
The Costly Aftermath
Rich Mullhollandof mouth engine . Effectively ended that word of mouth engine people going home and talking about our , their experience at our office overnight ended and then we had to start doing much more reaching out to people and selling . It was insane . It cost us an absolute fortune . In fact I would argue it nearly cost us the business .
Chris NortonWhy did you not reopen the office or had that ship sailed ?
Rich MullhollandSo two things . One , we gave our staff the chance to work from a distributed location , so we had even people in the same city worked hours away from each other . You know very , very far . We had staff in Joburg , in Cape Town , for a while , in Durban we have in Milton Keynes , armout and Isle of man . Where is the core ? Second of all , people become quite used to , you know , getting up late and working there , and so it became hard to convince . And third of all , by the time it got to the point where we needed to rebuild another big , massively exciting , conversation-worthy location for our clients and staff to come to , by this point I didn't have the margin and profits to make it . So now I was stuck in this catch 22 that we had to start from a product level again and build up yeah , that sounds challenging .
Chris NortonI think we've all been through the covid pandemic scenario , where we we've met a lot of people that have had problems from that period , from online entrepreneurs that have lost millions as well . So , yeah , it was a tough period , but you did well to come out of there focusing on online presentations
Reflections on Leadership Mistakes
Chris Norton. I think that's a nice to use the 2020 term pivot , wasn't it ?
Rich MullhollandYeah , it was a very real need . Everybody knew that they weren't good at presenting that way . The challenge is knowing when to . I guess that every time you pivot , sometimes it's just a swinging door and you need to understand that the door you didn't pass through it , the door , is still going to swing back and I didn't really anticipate that fast enough as a leader and I made some mistakes that probably had too many late nights . I definitely caused too much stress in late nights for my management team .
