Planning and pulling off a results-focused marketing campaign takes time, effort, and money. To have the best chance of launching a project on time, on budget and on target requires a structured approach to planning and project management. Most importantly, it requires strategic clarity at the beginning of the project, which sets the roadmap to measurable success outcomes, so that tactical screw-ups at the point of project execution are diminished.

Unfortunately, there are several surefire ways people can quite frankly sabotage their own campaign despite themselves.

Here are five great ways you can sabotage your own marketing campaign:

1. Launch multiple campaigns of similar themes within days of each other
2. Confuse the marketplace with similar but ‘different’ messages about each campaign
3. Give the media inconsistent information so they print your story, with a photograph showing the ‘other’ campaign
4. Plan your campaign to launch at the exact time major news stories are breaking
5. Don’t bother communicating the fact there are multiple campaigns to the people planning them so they can mitigate damages

Obviously, nobody would sabotage his or her own marketing campaign deliberately, but it is so easily and so often done. This happens for a couple of different reasons:

• There is no single point of accountability in the organization for marketing projects. Marketing decisions are de-centralized and multiple marketing silos exist throughout the organization, each doing their own marketing thing.

• There is a lack of understanding within the organization about the negative impact mismanaged marketing communications can have in the marketplace and how that affects the company’s bottom line.

If your marketing campaign gets sabotaged, all you can do at that point is keep calm and carry on, and try to turn each undesirable situation into an opportunity. All press is good press, right?

What’s your worst marketing campaign horror story? I’d love to hear about it.