1. Offering discounts and lower prices to new customers without making the same offer to existing customers. Telecoms, cable companies and others are notorious for this.
2. Telling the world you used research to discover the obvious. A well known Travel and Foreign Currency Company recently did this when they announced that they were adding a consumer travel ratings and review service to their website after ‘research’ found that customers were using third party sites for this purpose. Duh. Or, as David Ogilvy said, “Research is often used the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination.”
3. Telemarketing. Uggh. Let’s annoy and pester potential customers into buying from us. So, awful the Canadian government had to outlaw it.
4. Offshore customer service. Need I say more?
5. Treating incoming customer phone calls like a relay baton. To add insult to injury, using an automated computer voice and canned music interludes to do so.
6. Creating a product without involving the customer and then creative testing the product’s ad campaign in focus groups. Makes a lot of sense.
7. Revising the sunset clause on a loyalty points program and then retiring the members points, without prior notification. Lots of disgust about that one.
8. Calling a new, unknown and unadvertised product a brand.
9. Running boring, predictable ads and then claiming that advertising doesn’t work. Or, worse, that it’s dead.
10. Running an ad campaign telling people you’ve changed, rather than spending the money on, you know, actually changing. There are at least two high profile companies doing this currently.

This is just a start. Add yours in the comments.