I wear high heels all the time. I wear them because I love them.

And sometimes I love them too much and wear them when I shouldn’t.

I have fallen 4 times brutally because of my high heels and even though each time I hurt my knee pretty badly, I still cannot go without them. One thing I’ve learned, though: caution and savvy when shopping for shoes and when deciding what pair to wear depending on the impending activity.

So you can imagine my reaction when I received the following e-mail from Barneys New York a few minutes ago prompting me to “Fall for Yves Saint Laurent”.

The first thing that came to my mind when I read the headline was that they were telling me about some special activity related to the Yves Saint Laurent Fall collection. But when I opened the email, a picture of a gorgeous shoe appeared, containing yet another tagline “ Taking the gold standard to new heights”.  Well, the very first thing that came to my mind after seeing the shoes and reading the “heights” message was “Those shoes are super high and if I wear them I will probably fall…” then the whole experience of hurting my knee came back to me vividly.

And this is how an innocent email advertisement can become counter-productive and instead of making you think that you will look like a modern day Cleopatra in those heels, it revives a painful memory.

And it’s crazy how a simple expression that might normally work for the majority of products, is used in a totally wrong manner.

I don’t know whether the headlines for the e-updates are automatically generated by some system Barneys use or whether the editing of said updates is relegated to someone a bit inexperienced. But Fall + a picture of a shoe with some “new height standard” (no matter how gorgeous) = not such a great idea. So no, thank you Barneys, I will try not to fall for any shoe designer, ever again. And yes, your stores are great and the products you sell fabulous but you should always make sure your words are selected carefully. Otherwise it somehow kills the myth, don’t you think so?

I am writing this and another example comes to me: a few weeks ago I was in London and walking past a Swarovski store, I had to stop. Mother’s day in the UK was around the corner and Swarovski had stickers with the word “Mother” printed in pink and surrounded by what looked like a heart-shaped ribbon all over their windows.

But this is not what I saw first. I actually stopped because I thought “Smother” (def.: to suffocate) was what was written on those windows. And the first association that came to my mind was how some mothers tend to “smother” their kids. And that the word “smother” is actually also used to designate them. There even is a movie called “Smother” with Diane Keaton about an extreme mother. And it made me smile.

Maybe the good people at Swarovski never wanted to do anything else than placing he word “mother” in a ribbon heart. Maybe they wanted to style the heart to make it like an S for Swarovski…

But I smiled and said t to myself “ It’s amazing that nobody saw this while are creating, approving, producing or placing those stickers. It’s amazing how big brands with experienced teams and big budgets manage to create the exact opposite of that they intended to initially by neglecting to look at something in context. And it’s really amazing how no matter what you do, in retail, the tiniest detail can make or break an idea or a concept, no matter how great they are.“

Do you have any similar examples of auto-destructive messages or good marketing intentions gone bad?

I would be delighted to hear about them. Please email them with or without pictures. I will then compile all contributions and post them on this website. Email Maya

Looking  forward to hearing from you!