Speed Kills...Your Brand

Today, brands face increasing pressure to be first. The current advertising and marketing atmosphere pushes constant content. Yet, in the race to continuously push content and connect, brands are getting sloppy.

Over the past few weeks, my home state of Wisconsin has had three brand miscalculations.

The first issue was a brand collaboration by Adidas with an independent designer. The idea was great – launch a city-based Samba shoe. The shoe features a street grid map highlighting various neighborhoods of the city. Unfortunately, the St. Joseph’s neighborhood is misspelled as ‘St. Joseoh’s’. This is an issue that should have been caught before production. Was there a rush to push the shoe out quickly? What happened in production prechecks? 

The second problem impacted the nearly 4,000 runners who participated in the Milwaukee Marathon on April 11th. The finisher medals for the race included a very noticeable spelling mistake. One side of the medal included the text ‘Milwaukee Marthon’. The race management company, Ventures Endurance, has issued an apology statement. However, runners were left to wonder how this mistake happened. There were only a few words on the race medals thus it should not have been terribly difficult to ensure they were all spelled correctly. The push for rapid production without carefully checking for mistakes makes your company look bad. In turn, it creates extra PR and advertising work in the future. While it’s not possible to know for certain if this was an AI or human error, when companies rely too heavily on AI, more mistakes occur. This can lead to brand mistrust. 

Finally, the Milwaukee Brewers released their Nike City Connect jerseys. The jerseys have the word ‘Wisco’ on the front. Rarely do true Wisconsinites refer to their state as ‘Wisco’. Furthermore, the team is the Milwaukee Brewers, not the Wisconsin Brewers. Some of the design decisions in the jersey are thoughtful. The typography is a nice throwback to some past Brewers gear as well as Milwaukee’s brewing history. However, the general feeling among many fans is that the term ‘Wisco’ isn’t appropriate. Again, it’s uncertain whether this was an AI influenced design or simply a miscalculation on the part of Nike. However, a little more time and attention to detail could have helped with better market understanding and prevented the perception problems with these jerseys.

 Brands, both large and small, face a growing amount of pressure to produce more, faster. Unfortunately, this results in lapses in quality which in turn creates brand mistrust. Taking extra time to properly plan and check the quality of your content and products leads to better results. Hiring real people to do the work instead of relying on AI assistance can also boost the quality of your materials and build better trust in your brand.