Gold can saga: 3 tweets cost a beer company's CEO about Rs 5 crore as his marketing scheme backfires

A Beer company BrewDog CEO's James Watt shares interesting but costly story on Linkedin.

New Delhi: Beer company BrewDog founder and CEO James Watt has shared an interesting but costly story on Linkedin of how his prize scheme cum ad campagin gone wrong in excessive excitement and exhiliration. Everything cost him about £500,000 or Rs 5 crore after paying all the winner to sort out the matter in charge of misleading customers.

It all started when he decided to run an ad campagin cum lucky prize after being inspired from Willie Wonka, and for that, he hid 50 gold cans in cases of beer. The lucky ones who would get gold cans would also be awarded about Rs 13 lakhs worth BrewDog shares.

However, he soon realised his mistake which he hadn’t before because of his excessive zeal that those cans weren’t made entirely from gold but being galvanised by gold plate only.  

“However, I got so carried away in the excitement of the project that I made some costly mistakes.
I falsely thought the cans were made from solid gold when they were indeed only gold plated. In my enthusiasm, I had misunderstood the process of how they were made and the initial tweets I sent out told customers of the prospect of finding ‘solid gold cans’. It was a silly mistake and it only appeared in around 3 of a total of 50 posts about the promotion but as it turns out, those 3 tweets were enough to do a lot of damage,” James Watt wrote in his linkedin post.

Winners of the gold started complaining about the wrong ad and called the company a fraud. “Things started to go wrong when the winners got their cans. Despite the fact our valuation  of £15,000 per can was accurate some of the winners had seen my earlier mention of ‘solid gold’ and complained when they realised they were only gold plated. The ASA got involved too and ruled that we had run a misleading promotion,” Watt further wrote in the post.

When things getting worse, he realised his folly to not check things before. However, he wrote, it was too late.

The healines were filled with Gold Can saga. After a lot of uproar and press coverage, James Watt decided to pay all the winners the deserved prize from his purse. He wrote what was looking like one of the best campagins in our history was no, decidedly, the worst.

“I got in touch with all 50 winners and let them know that if they were unhappy with their prize I would personally offer them the full cash amount as an alternative. Furthermore, I promised to fund this myself so the business did not have to suffer financially from my mistake. All in all, it ended up costing me around £470,000 – well over 2 and a half years ‘salary,” he wrote.

He said those were 3 very expensive mistaken tweets that I sent out in my enthusiasm for our new campaign.