In November of 1992, Dave Dixon, a horse trainer from Workington, England bought a washing machine for £560, the equivalent of about £1,100 ($1,200) today. For the next few months, all one can assume is that Dixon and his family were perfectly happy with their new washing machine, but as the summer of 1993 approached, that changed. The washing machine -- barely six months old! -- broke. So he called a repairman, which Hoover, the manufacturer of the machine, dutifully dispatched. On or around May 28, 1993, the Hoover van arrived on the Dixon's driveway, its driver ready to get to work.

While the repairman was working on the machine, he and Dixon got into a bit of an argument. The repairman called Dixon an idiot; Dixon, he'd later tell the BBC, replied with "I'm not as stupid as you are. I'm not going to have to walk home." Dixon, per the Guardian, brought "a horsebox full of steaming manure" behind the van, blocking its exit in a way few people would dare mess with. The repair guy left safely, but the van remained. Dixon had hijacked it.

A week later, the van was still there. The police didn't care. No one really blamed them. Hoover, most people felt, deserved it. 

The reason? Hoover's disastrous marketing campaign.

Much of the world was gripped by a recession in the early 1990s and the UK was no exception. Hoover dominated the vacuum cleaner market in the area; as the Los Angeles Times reported, "Hoover’s British operation [had] built the kind of public image that corporations covet. It is known as trustworthy and reliable. And its name is synonymous with the activity of its most popular product. In Britain, you don’t 'vacuum the carpet.' You 'Hoover the carpet.'” With an estimated 50% market share, Hoover probably could have survived the recession. But the downturn created a slowdown in purchasing that the company didn't anticipate. They were left with a lot of excess inventory -- already-manufactured vacuums -- that, unsold, was ironically just sitting around collecting dust. Hoover wanted a way to sell these machines.

And because the economy was in recession, Hoover wasn't alone in having excess inventory. A small travel agency called JSI Travel was operating in the UK and Europe at the time and was having a hard time filling flights for their airline clients. The flights were going from destination to destination anyway, and each unsold seat was an opportunity missed. JSI Travel approached Hoover with an idea, as The Hustle explains: "anyone who spent more than £100 (~$250 USD today) on a Hoover product at a qualifying department store would get two free round-trip tickets to a destination in Europe," which probably cost around £150 to £200 if you booked them directly. Sounds like a good deal -- perhaps too good to be true. But it kind of worked out. The margins on the excess inventory Hoover had was high. The prices of plane tickets were low. Hoover planned to upsell customers who took advantage of the deal on other high-margin products like travel insurance and also to get referral money from hotels.

But just to be sure this wasn't a big old mess, Hoover also made it cumbersome for most purchasers to claim their free tickets -- you need to send in your receipt within two weeks of purchase, then fill out a registration form within two weeks of receiving that, and then send Hoover a proposed itinerary within 30 days after that. These barriers helped limit Hoover's exposure but it also left a lot of would-be travelers with a vacuum they didn't really want and without plane tickets. There was a tiny amount of buzz that this was more scam than deal, but thankfully for Hoover, the bad press was rather limited. What Hoover saw, instead, were a lot of vacuum sales, a small number of plane tickets being issued, and no apparent hit to their brand reputation. 

So they expanded the offer, as seen below.