The Marketing Mistake that cost Lifelock Millions

What happens when aggressive marketing meets an incompetent product??

The biggest marketing failure of all time.?

Just to give you some reference, LifeLock is a tool that protects you against online identity theft.?

Now let’s understand what happened.

The company is very new and eager to prove itself. The CEO, Todd Davis, came up with a? bold and aggressive idea for the marketing campaign.

The idea was to…..?

(Wait for it)

.

.

His idea was to print his Social Security Number on all the marketing and promotional materials giving an open challenge to all the hackers. This was a bold move and if it had been successful it would have been the greatest marketing stunt of all time.?

But it wasn’t!!

When Todd presented this idea, the employees in the company were hesitant to go on with this but their opinions were ultimately ignored.

The idea was ultimately implemented with Todd’s Face, his social security number and an open challenge blasted all over the promotional material.

What happened after this campaign is chuckle-worthy and sad at the same time.

Prompted by this open challenge given by the CEO, the hackers all over the country got on their screens and managed to hack Todd Davis’s account 13 times. It got so bad that loans were taken in his name illegally.

The price they paid.. (Quite Literally)

As you might have guessed, the CEO himself lost millions.?

However, this was not the end of it.

This news spread like a wildfire and every paper, news channel, magazine and online portal covered this story. As proved by the campaign Lifelock’s product was now declared to be a Hoax and FTC lawsuits were filed against the company.

As per the FTC’s own words:

“Lifelock falsely claimed it protected consumers’ identity 24/7/365 by providing alerts as soon as it received any indication there was a problem.”

What started as a bold marketing mover backfired and ended with a multi-million dollar lawsuit.?

The company was hit with multimillion-dollar fines for false advertising.

Was this the end of it?

No.

Following this debacle Lifelock was given some time to get its product up to the mark. This would have the saving grace. But the company faltered to pay the initial fine. This in turn led to an investigation opening up.

The investigation dug even deeper and found out that the company failed to meet the basic product guidelines.? This meant a 100 million dollar fine.

So what exactly went wrong?

Well, apart from negligence to paying fines, the biggest mistake was-

Overestimating the quality and performance of the product.?

The lessons you can learn?

The marketing campaign itself was Genius. It was attention-grabbing, it was bold but it missed the mark because the promise didn’t match what was being delivered.

Whenever we market any product, the feisty thing to keep in mind is the message you are giving away. If your message doesn’t match what is being given, you are in trouble.

So proper knowledge and testing of your product is a must and having a solid product and service that is marketed from the base.

Your marketing message should always match the actual value you deliver with your products and services. Do proper research on your products and maybe listen to marketing professionals!

If you think this is a huge blunder then let me tell you there are a lot of businesses out there that have made even bigger mistakes. The biggest marketing mistake made by the biggest corporations out there.

In this newsletter series, I plan to cover all of them and a lot more. Marketing strategies that made or broke some businesses. So stay tuned for Marketing Moments and Subscribe to it Right NOW!!

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