With the recent H&M blunder, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that sometimes marketing goes horribly wrong despite having the best intentions at heart. Now, we’re not here to defend H&M’s choices, but we are here to tell you that mistakes happen. Sometimes these mistakes go under the radar, but every now and then Twitter finds a new problematic campaign to rip apart online. Here are three of the biggest marketing clangers from 2017.

1 – McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce – October 2017

This one will be familiar to Rick and Morty fans. Thanks to a joke made about a limited edition dipping sauce offered by McDonald’s in the late 1990s as a tie in to the movie Mulan, fans of Rick and Morty made it their mission to get their hands on the 20 year old treat. Never ones to miss a marketing opportunity, McDonald’s jumped on the hype-wagon. They sent the creators of Rick and Morty their own supply of the sauce, and when fans questioned why they couldn’t have it too, McDonald’s decided to make the sauce available to the public (in the USA) for a limited time. When it came time to start the Szechuan Sauce promotion, demand seriously outstripped supply and thousands of Rick and Morty fans were left disappointed (and had a lot to say about it online).
Moral of the story: if you’re going to stoke the flames of hype, make sure you have the goods to back it up.

2 – Dove’s Unintentional Racism – October 2017

Beauty product giant Dove found themselves in hot water over an ad that depicted women from a number of races. The problem was that the ad focused on how Dove products make women more beautiful, and that they showed this with women transitioning from black to white. Outrage broke on Twitter with calls to boycott the company that had unknowingly associated beauty with whiteness.
Moral of the story: race is a touchy subject and marketers should be very careful not to associate a specific trait with a specific race. Dove’s apology, admitting that they’d “missed the mark in representing women of colour thoughtfully” was well received, but they have a long way to go in regaining the trust of women of colour.

3 – OUTsurance Father’s Day – June 2017

Brands celebrating days of importance of social media has become the norm. Father’s Day brought us OUTsurance’s biggest social media mishap to date. The company posted a video featuring multiple fathers interacting with their children. The problem: not a single one of the fathers was black. Of course, social media was ablaze with people bringing attention to the fact that OUTsurance was basically saying that black men aren’t good fathers. The company blamed the mishap on a junior employee, but the fact at the end of the day is that the post would likely have been approved by a supervisor.

Moral of the story: once again, race is a touchy subject. If you’re going to be showing a range of people in your ad, make sure that all races are represented. And don’t blame it on a junior employee when everything goes wrong.

H&M isn’t the first company to make a huge marketing mistake. They’re not even the first to miss something potentially racist. Having diverse creative and brand management teams could go a long way to prevent work that could be considered offensive from reaching the public.