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 Mistake That Burnt Me Out: Staying Too Long Where I Didn’t Belong
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Cory Koryczan opens up about the career mistake that nearly broke her.
Staying too long in a role that no longer fit. She’d built her identity around someone else’s business and clung to safety until it led to burnout. In this episode, Cory talks about the cost of over-loyalty, the fear that kept her stuck, and how she rebuilt her courage to finally walk away. She also shares a second big lesson from returning to work after maternity leave.
Why confidence doesn’t just snap back and how discomfort became her best teacher. It’s honest, raw, and packed with lessons for anyone who’s ever ignored their gut to “play it safe.”
Is your strategy still right in 2026? Book a free 15-min no obligation discovery call with our host: 👉 [Book your call with Chris now] 👈
Subscribe to our newsletter
👉 Subscribe to our newsletter here. 👈
Follow Chris:
X, TikTok, LinkedIn
Follow Will:
LinkedIn
Follow The Show:
TikTok, YouTube Instagram
Is there anything in your career that you've done or learnt from that you think would be worth sharing with with people on here? It's a cathartic experience. It's a friendly environment, Claire. Thank you, Chris. Well, I've made lots of mistakes over the years. But as somebody who loves to learn, I guess that's you know, I see mistakes as once I've got over the the discomfort, the the extreme discomfort, um, I look for what's the learning here, and I think that's really key. That that one that I shared a few minutes ago around attaching my identity to others' businesses was probably one of the most profound experiences in terms of mistakes because I stayed somewhere longer than I should have done. And it it
Framing The Big Career Question
SPEAKER_00cost me a lot in terms of you know, burnout, overcompensating, you know, lots of different things I was trying to do in order to sort of stay where I was and stay hold on like to that safety.
Mistakes, Identity, And Burnout
SPEAKER_00Um because I wasn't brave enough actually to go and do what I really wanted to do at that time. And yeah, and so so much of what I do now is leaning into the courage because I've learned the lesson the hard way, uh, in terms of um playing it safe and keeping in the status quo bias and keeping everything as they are. They often say, don't they, better the devil you know than the devil you don't, but I don't agree with that at all now, having learned having learnt that lesson. Uh so yeah, I would say that was probably one of the biggest lessons in my career. Another lesson was um coming back after maternity leave. So I left a master of my arts. I was smashing it out of the park as a leader, you know, doing some incredible things. And I didn't, because I hadn't studied neuroscience at that point, I didn't not have no idea
Choosing Courage Over Safety
SPEAKER_00what was going on in terms of the brain chemistry, the hormones, emotions, how lack of sleep would be impacting my cognitive functioning, and how it's it's a process that you go through in terms of um of all of that. And so when I came back into the workplace, I just felt like I'd come back as an apprentice and was really hard on myself. Like, what's happened to you? What's going on? Why are you why are you not performing
Returning After Maternity Leave
SPEAKER_00in the way that you used to? And uh, it was only my boss at the time who pushed me out of my comfort zone and got me to do something that felt so wildly uncomfortable that I never would have put myself forward for, that that started to build in the discomfort, the belief, the confidence, and all of those things. And so so, yeah, they're probably my biggest, biggest lessons in terms of my career.
