What is the worst marketing campaign you have ever seen?

Bonus point if it sounds like a great idea on paper.

There is this hot boardgame on sale here. It’s a tie-in to a popular comic book series. It’s mostly for fans of the comics but the gameplay is simple enough for an outsider to try. I bought it and it’s actually really fun indeed. But my, the marketing strategy for this game is just out of this world.

So I was among the first people to preorder it when it was still in production. I chose the “special” edition as it said, and I got it with some gifts. My gifts: a T-shirt and a shitty card with stock images of the characters and signatures of the comic book authors. Yeah, they did promise a T-shirt and the authors’ signatures, but a card? Come on, that’s the best you can do?

Fastforward to a month later. The producers wanted to boost sale, so they issued the special edition again, this time with a stack of Uno cards! And then a moth later they launched another campaign, this time with an exclusive calendar from the comic book authors!

On paper the campaigns sound like a great idea, giving out special prizes to motivate buyers. But there are two things that went horribly wrong here: first, the prize just got more valuable with each campaign. So for the people who ordered it early, what’s the point of being the first in line if they get less privilege than the later comers? Second, the boardgame just came out 3 months ago, so the comparison is inevitable. Why didn’t they just give out the original prizes of the preorder campaign?

I saw a lot of pissed-off customers in the comment section. They either ignore them or deliver the most generic answers possible. They seem to know they fucked up.