{"id":40621,"date":"2015-10-12T09:38:17","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T13:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uncommongoods.com\/?p=40621"},"modified":"2015-10-13T11:30:48","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T15:30:48","slug":"uncommon-knowledge-how-do-you-completely-fail-at-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/2015\/uncommon-knowledge-how-do-you-completely-fail-at-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncommon Knowledge How Do You Completely Fail at Marketing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Choo<\/a><\/p>\n

You take a page out of William George Crush\u2019s book, that\u2019s how. William was the passenger agent for the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad\u2014also known as the Katy\u2014back in 1896. He was tasked with making sure the Katy had enough passenger business to warrant its ongoing operation and he knew he\u2019d need to do something big to put the railroad\u2019s name on the map. Throwing logic to the wind, he decided that in order to convince people that the Katy was a reliable and safe, he would stage a train crash. What was the thought process, if any, here? William noticed that train crashes tended to draw crowds and rather than dismissing it as morbid curiosity, he saw it as marketing genius. For whatever reason, no one stopped him and William went full steam ahead, offering tickets and transportation to anyone interested in a contrived accident. Turns out, William was right about one thing\u2014people do like crashes. About 40,000 people turned out for the spectacle and watched as two locomotives lunged at each other, meeting in the center of a four-mile track. The result was an inevitable crash and burn\u2014the trains\u2019 boilers exploded and the ensuing chaos caused massive injuries and the loss of a photographer\u2019s eye. William was fired the next day\u2026and then rehired because shockingly, there was no bad press from the incident. Be that as it may, this marketing tactic is thankfully one that never quite caught on.<\/p>\n

Choo Choo Train Dining Set <\/a>| $20<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This idea certainly wasn’t on track for success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":40624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1208],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40621"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40621"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40625,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40621\/revisions\/40625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}