🧯 Oops, We Made It Worse (Part 1)
Part One of 'Oops, We Made It Worse' (Part 1 of 7 Part Series)
🧯 Oops, We Made It Worse
A Field Guide to Glorious Failures in Branding, Business, and Being a Grown-Up
Before we dive headfirst into exploding sodas, flaming car designs, and mascots that could legally be classified as hate crimes, let’s pause for just a second to talk about something rare: when things do go right.
I’m writing a book called Collaborate Better, a guide to building strong teams, great ideas, and careers that don’t end in burnout or branding disasters. It’s about how to make collaboration actually work—the kind that leads to inspired products, not the kind that ends with your customers making memes about your logo looking like someone’s naughty bits.
But before we collaborate better, we must first gawk at those who collaborated worse. Much, much worse.
Welcome to Oops, We Made It Worse—a satirical but lovingly researched tour through the most bewildering, overhyped, and brand-eroding decisions in modern history. Think of this series as a public service for marketers, leaders, and anyone who’s ever thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we made a Thanksgiving-flavored soda?”
Spoiler: It wouldn’t.
🚧 Exhibit A: The Beverage Hall of Shame
Our first case study is carbonated chaos in a bottle—bizarre beverages that seemed like a good idea in the pitch meeting but left customers confused, betrayed, or actively ill. From Bacon Soda to Orbitz (the drink, not the travel site), we’ll examine what happens when innovation outruns taste testing.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before we crack open that radioactive blue bottle of Pepsi Blue, let’s survey the whole crime scene. Here’s a preview of the branding sins and strategic faceplants we’ll be covering in this series:
🧃 What Were They Drinking?!
Coming next. The drinks that made people say, “Why does this taste like melted candy and soap?” Spoiler: because someone in marketing said yes to “coffee cola with jelly balls.”
🥤 Poll: Which of these failed beverages would you drink for money (and how much)?
Orbitz (lava lamp juice)
Bacon Soda
Pepsi Ice Cucumber
Turkey & Gravy Jones Soda
I’d rather lick a battery
🧠 Engagement angle: Turns stomachs, sparks memory, fuels comment section horror stories.
🧁 Not a Real Person: The Aunt Jemima Myth and the Marketing of a Minstrel Show
Aunt Jemima wasn’t real. She came from a 19th-century minstrel song, created by a white man in blackface. Two white entrepreneurs borrowed the name to sell pancake mix, and for over a century, the brand leaned into the racist “mammy” stereotype—smiling, subservient, fictional.
Quaker Oats turned her into a syrupy mascot, even hiring Black women to play her at events. It wasn’t heritage—it was branding built on nostalgia for oppression.
Disney’s Song of the South pulled a similar stunt in 1946. It featured Uncle Remus, a joyful, storytelling figure who loved life on the plantation—slavery unspoken, racism sugar-coated. So problematic, Disney won’t release it anywhere.
The lesson? Cultural insensitivity ages terribly. Aunt Jemima is now Pearl Milling Company. Song of the South is buried deeper than a Disney vault. Pancakes still exist. So does taste. Use both wisely.
🚗 Overhyped Cars That Turned Out to Be Lemons
The Ford Edsel. Pontiac Aztek. Yugo. What do they have in common?
Massive hype, catastrophic execution, and maybe a faint whiff of something on fire.
These weren’t just bad cars—they were full-blown branding implosions on wheels. The Edsel was supposed to be the future of Ford… instead, it looked like it had a toilet seat for a grille and sold like a wet sponge. The Aztek? Marketed as a rugged SUV for cool Gen Xers but ended up looking like a failed Transformer in mid-morph. It only became iconic thanks to Breaking Bad, and even Walter White looked ashamed to drive it.
And then there’s the Yugo—the most affordable car in America, and it showed. Built in Yugoslavia, the Yugo had all the reliability of a paperclip in a rainstorm. If you made it home without breaking down, you won the Yugo lottery.
Let’s not forget the DeLorean DMC-12—stainless steel swagger with gullwing doors and the performance of a wounded goat. Iconic? Yes. Good car? Not even slightly.
Lesson: No amount of futuristic doors, chrome-plated dreams, or nostalgic buzz can save a car if it breaks down faster than its PR campaign.
Spoiler: If your vehicle earns nicknames like "deathtrap," "disaster on wheels," or "the car that killed the brand," your marketing team didn’t launch a product—they launched a cautionary tale.
🚗 Poll: Which of these cars would you ironically drive for clout today?
Pontiac Aztek
Yugo GV
DeLorean DMC-12
Ford Edsel
Whichever one is already on fire
🧠 Engagement angle: Let readers lean into guilty pleasures or sarcastic car pride.
🧨 Elon Musk: Breaking His Own Toys in Real Time
From Twitter/X chaos to Cybertruck delays to brain chips in barnyard animals, Elon Musk has built some of the boldest brands of the 21st century—and now seems determined to dismantle them from the inside.
It’s not a midlife crisis. It’s a $44 billion performance art piece about ego, algorithms, and alienating your most loyal customers.
Take Tesla. Once the crown jewel of clean energy cool, it was beloved by climate-conscious early adopters who saw Musk as a techno-visionary fighting fossil fuels with futuristic design. But now? The brand’s biggest threat isn’t a new competitor—it’s Elon himself.
While Musk still talks the talk on sustainability, he’s become increasingly politically aligned with voices who deny, mock, or actively fight climate science. He cozies up to far-right influencers, amplifies anti-regulation rhetoric, and courts the very demographic that proudly rolls coal and calls EVs "woke golf carts."
The result? A growing number of Tesla fans are peeling off—uncomfortable with the disconnect between the company’s green mission and its CEO’s chosen political company. They’re trading in their Model 3s, scrubbing their X accounts, and wondering how the man who promised a cleaner future ended up palling around with climate trolls.
Lesson: You don’t have to deny climate change to undermine your climate brand.
Sometimes all it takes is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the people who do—and handing them the aux cord.
🐯 Mascot Madness: When Sports Teams Go Way Too Far
Sometimes mascots unite a fanbase. Other times, they terrify children, offend entire cultures, or go viral for looking a little too… anatomical.
Let’s start with the classics: Chief Wahoo, the longtime mascot of the Cleveland Indians, was a grinning, red-faced cartoon caricature of a Native American—equal parts offensive and outdated. It took decades of protests and public pressure for the team to finally let him go, proving once again that tradition isn’t a defense—it’s often the problem.
Then there’s King Cake Baby, the New Orleans Pelicans’ Mardi Gras-inspired fever dream. Picture a giant plastic baby head with dead eyes and a frozen scream. It was meant to be festive. Instead, it looked like something that crawled out of a haunted bakery.
But nothing—and we mean nothing—has captured recent attention like the Chesapeake Oyster Catchers. Their logo, unveiled with innocent intentions, went immediately viral for resembling something… far less innocent. Let’s just say it prompted thousands of tweets, a few awkward press statements, and one extremely uncomfortable biology lesson. For a team about oysters, their branding raised more questions about anatomy than seafood.
And that’s just the surface. From minor league teams named the Trash Pandas and Baby Cakes, to unofficial college mascots like Scrotie (yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like), sports has a long tradition of suiting up ideas that never should have made it out of the group chat.
Lesson: Mascots should inspire—not traumatize. And if yours looks like a hate crime, a horror prop, or something from a banned health textbook, it’s time for a redesign.
🎯 Bonus Meta-Poll:
What should we cover next in Oops, We Made It Worse?
The worst marketing slogans of all time
🍔 Fast food disasters (Arch Deluxe, McDLT, etc.)
💔 Tech that broke our hearts (Zune, Google Glass)
📢 Corporate apologies so bad they made it worse
🎭 PR Stunts That Backfired Spectacularly
🧠 Engagement angle: Builds hype for the next entry and lets your readers feel invested in the series direction.
🧠 What This Series Is Really About
Each of these branding belly flops contains a deeper truth—about audience insight, cultural awareness, trust, and what happens when no one in the room says “maybe not.”
It’s easy to laugh at exploding soda bottles and creepy mascots. It’s harder—but more useful—to understand why they happened and what we can learn. Because whether you’re leading a Fortune 500, running a startup, or just trying to avoid being the next Pepsi Ice Cucumber, the rules are the same:
Know your audience.
Test your assumptions.
Don't gaslight your customers.
And never name your team “the 🐷 Snortles™.”
🎬 Coming Next: What Were They Drinking?!
Crack open a warm Orbitz and join us for a carbonated ride through the weirdest beverages ever bottled. You’ll never look at cucumber soda—or bacon fizz—the same way again.
Next Blog In This Seven Part Series: 🧃 What Were They Drinking?!: 2nd of 7