43 Epic PR Fails That People Can’t Believe Were Actually Approved

I was a manager at Cabelas, and they got the idea to change the music in the store to nature sounds. They spent over $1 million on this project. The week it launched, I have never seen such an overwhelming negative response from our customers. Multiple people threatened to cut up their cards and never return. While I get the sentiment, some of the tracks sounded like a poorly maintained car rather than an animal. It was changed within two weeks.


PracticalCandy:
I worked at Ikea in the US and during 2020/2021 they changed the music to this awful slow elevator musick. The company posted multiple articles in the internal website and newsletters explaining the decision to coworkers. Apparently it was based on research regarding music with slower beats making customers slow down and spend more time shopping, thereby spending more money per visit. I may be misremember the exact reasoning given it was years ago. Anyhow, the coworkers, myself included, HATED it. There weren't very many tracks and it just drilled into our brains and was obnoxious, but also made us tired. So many people complained on the internal comment sections. Corporate kept trying to defend their decision, but overtime (like 1-2 years) they switched back to the prior style of music.
Oh, and to make matters worse, at closing time they put on music with faster beats to hurry customers up to leave. It was the only time coworkers weren't complaining about the music. The music was changed for the whole country and was controlled by Corporate. However, my dept had control of the master and individual volume controls, so we just lowered it in the office spaces to save our sanity as much as possible without HR noticing.

The old CEO of BP with the worst quote of all time after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. He said something like “I want my life back.” Well he got his wish because I think he got canned not long after.

Conscious_Abies4577:
We studied the Deepwater Horizon disaster in my Crisis Communications class— spent an entire week dissecting the CEO and the company’s initial responses. Absolutely ridiculous failure in communication at all levels

Gerald Ratner, boss of Ratners jewelers saying the stuff his company sold was trash. Watch him ruin his own company


DeliciousPangolin:
Ratner got fired, but the company just changed it's name and is still one of the biggest jewellery retailers in the world. They own pretty much every mall jewellery store in the English-speaking world. Even Ratner recovered after a while. People pay him to speak about the experience.

Years ago, my husband worked for Nokia. The job market was terribly unstable at the time, and they promised right and left that no changes were coming. It would be business as usual. Fast-forward to several weeks before Christmas, and they handed out their holiday gifts. It was a nice fleece blanket with Nokia prominently embroidered on the side. This was followed by the surprise announcement that the plant would be shut down and relocated to Mexico within two months. They would start staggered layoffs beginning on the first of the year. Most of the first shift took their blankets, wrapped them around themselves, and huddled together under the work stations. They were practicing for their new life of unemployment in a horrible job market. Management was not amused. The second shift didn't get their blanket until quitting time and were not alowed to open them in the facility. As a special touch, the staggered layoffs were a hostage situation. They offered generous compensation packages, but you had to stay until you were released. You wouldn't receive your benefit if you left early. That made job hunting nearly impossible.

Still, employees huddling under their workstations to make a point was funny. They were shivering, holding out coffee cups for donations, making signs about what they would do for help. They made an absolutely beloved spectacle.

Pierre Poilievre from Canada's Convervative party campaigned on the platform of making groceries and housing more affordable, meanwhile his campaign manager ran a PR firm that represented the companies that are most actively making groceries and housing unaffordable.

Kevin Spacey thinking he could escape very serious and troubling accusations by coming out as gay. Not sure what the thought process was on that one. .

ThisistheHoneyBadger:
And also releasing random videos as his character from House of Cards. Just bizarre to me.

DiGiorno responded to a Twitter hashtag, #WhyIStayed, with "You had pizza", not realizing that it was about people staying in toxic relationships.

ussrowe:
I remember a fashion company tweeting about their footware while "boots on the ground" was trending because of military action in Syria. I looked it up and it was Kenneth Cole in 2013.

Papa John gets fired from Papa John's for saying the n word.

It gets better because you're probably heard that but not what actually happened.

He was complaining in a meeting that they were getting criticized heavily for their wording in (i think) an ad. And he goes "its not like we said..." and said it.

The execs leaked it because they had been looking for a reason to get rid of him.

Electrolux offering a free trip with every new vacuum sold. The trip was worth much more than the vacuum and people were buying them like crazy almost bankruptcy the company.

SUBWAY!!! Someone noticed that their sub measured 11 inches instead of 12 inches and took a picture

Anyone with half a brain knew all they had to do was do a $4.58 footlong Friday (thats what 11/12ths of the $5 footlong would have been) while also saying in the ad that they would do better QA to make sure the sandwiches were the correct size.

What did they do????....... Footlong is not intended to be a unit of measurment....... .

rividz:
It's wild how 20 years ago everyone was Eating Fresh and now in 2026 no one wants a fifteen dollar donut bread soy frozen chicken sandwich.

ActualWhiterabbit:
Really it was just the store being lazy and not setting up the bread right. But for manufacturers it was worse because they asked the smallest plant that made like 30 bread sticks a day on how to verify they were all within spec and then apply that to my plants when even the medium plants made more in one day than they do a week.
Subway just freaks out over nothing always. The ADA scandal resulting from people not realizing ingredients can be used for multiple things caused them to rush a new recipe for their white and wheat breads with very little testing. But after they learned what dough conditioners were they just added salt because that makes bread taste better and most of our other clients had 3-4x as much salt per batch. But all the other places that used ADA just ignored it.

Target's CEO.

Dude took over in 2014, after Target's spectacular failure in Canada. He managed to wrap that up, and lead Target to a decade of incredible success as a business and brand.

Then he failed to read the room so hard and backed of the DEI stuff that he used to champion, and tanked so hard his own total comp as CEO tells the tale. Guy made 77 million dollars for himself in 2020. By 2024, his take home as CEO was less than 10 million. Replaced this year.


KHSebastian:

I'll never really understand this one. Target was a brand popular with a particular audience. They specifically decided to target an audience that actively disliked them instead. Which means they alienated the audience that liked them, to try and court an audience that already hated them and wouldn't stop.
It'd be like Ford throwing blue collar people under the bus and trying to get anti ICE protestors and computer programmers to be the target audience for their trucks.

That ozempic ad during the super bowl that was complaining about vanity Healthcare being only for the rich. To sell a subscription vanity Healthcare service that only the rich can afford.

I remember Malaysian Airlines doing a bucket list campaign. After losing two planes and several hundred people.

The Gillette "do better, men" commercial was kind of a headscratcher. Like, you overwhelmingly sell products to men. Contrary to their own assessment most of the time, men are extremely fragile, insecure, and hypersensitive to criticism. What did you think was going to happen?

I don't think the premise was wrong (it's probably more relevant now than ever, really) but, like, what was the business rationale there? Lol.

The Oregon town whose police department planned a Halloween event called “Hide and Seek with a Cop.”

It was cancelled.

Janet Jackson claiming she believed Kamala Harris was lying about being half black during an interview with The Guardian (months before the '24 election).

Then doubling down when someone claiming to be her PR rep said he was fired because he issued a statement of apology on Janet's behalf.

Snapple tried to bring the largest popsicle in the world to NYC in June and it melted before it got off the truck.

The WiFi speaker company Sonos released a new app months before it was ready, which lost a ton of basic features that the previous app had - we're talking really basic stuff here like the ability to skip tracks or edit your play queue.

It's been I think about 18 months now and Android users have only just got something that resembles the original app in terms of functionality.

The worst thing about the whole debacle was once you'd updated to the new app there was no way of going back to the old one.

Their CEO resigned but it'll take a long time for the company to recover its reputation.

Nokia put out the N-Gage, an ahead-of-its-time gaming/phone hybrid and debuted it at the annual E3 convention.
For one, you had to remove the battery to swap games. Also, to talk on it as a phone you had to turn it sideways - like holding a taco meat-side toward your ear.
But PR-wise, they had a big presentation where a bikini-clad girl had the N-Gage’s price painted on her stomach: 299, which was more than most though reasonable. Also, her belly-button made it look like it read 2.99.

Barbara Streisand had some PR go so horribly wrong that the named the outcome after her. “Streisand effect”.