People try and create innovative marketing solutions on a regular basis to boost their sales and brand awareness. However many businesses fail to realise that market research is just as important as the overall execution.

We have compiled a list of what we believe are the top 5 biggest marketing failures.

#5 Vitaminwater their marketing failure came when they launched their marketing campaign based on the idea of playing off Canada’s bilingualism by jumbling English and French words on the bottle caps of Vitaminwater. Everything ran smoothly until the phrase “you retard” happened to appear on the lid of a young woman’s drink, a young woman who happened to have a half-sister with cerebral palsy.

#4 Jagermeister due to being a brand targeted at young party go-ers, Jagermeister decided to sponsor a rather large pool party featuring plenty of the bottles in the hands of the guests. To add to the “vibe” they wanted to create a cool mist coming from the water so they decided to add liquid nitrogen to the water. A little market research would have told them that when the substance is mixed with chlorine, it produces are harmful toxin. Safe to say the pool was cleared in no time.

#3 Mcdonalds this is probably the biggest brand to make such a big marketing mistake. Despite the success of McDonalds’ previous campaigns, they decided to launch marketing specifically to the Big Mac. The campaign pictured a dark background with a very distressed woman crying into her hands with the text ‘You are not alone.’ Followed with the much smaller print ‘Millions of people love the Big Mac too’. Now obviously making a joke of mental illness/abuse never goes down well, no matter how established your brand is.

#2 Dr Pepper Now this case is more of a social media fail, but marketing none the less. When the Guns and Roses announced their album Chinese Democracy in 1994, it still hadn’t been launched by 2008. Dr Pepper took an opportunity to portray themselves as cool music-lovers by stating if the album is released by the end of the year they will give a free can of Dr Pepper to every single American. Less than eight months later the album was released and Dr Pepper did not have the means to provide so many free products, or a way of claiming them. They hastily launched a website which crashed immediately. FAIL.

#1 Hoover This is by far the biggest marketing fail of all time as you probably know. Hoover was carrying a large surplus stock of vacuum cleaners and needed to sell them immediately to free up space. They launched an offer where if customers spent more than £100 on products they would win free airline tickets, first round Europe, then expanded to USA. Customer responses overwhelmed the company and Hoover had not anticipated the chaos that was to come.

At 22, we know how important it is to create a marketing campaign that not only gives you brand awareness, but is researched and executed in a professional manner that creates no back lash, or fiascos… Simply a brilliant marketing campaign.