Epicurious’ Tactless Tweets
Inauthentic Cause Marketing on Twitter
Where is the line between supporting a local community when something terrible has happened and a shameless ploy to insert yourself into a trending topic in order to promote your products?
To answer that question, I wanted to look at this example of a #brandfail on Twitter by Epicurious, a website focused on food and recipes. Below are some tweets from Epicurious right after the Boston Marathon bombings.
Yes, you read correctly. They just offered a “bowl of breakfast energy” to people in Boston mourning the incident.
These tweets feel shallow and disingenuous. It feels like the tweet’s author was thinking of the bombings like St. Patrick’s day: an innocuous holiday to mention when trying to come up with creative and relevant tweets that could link back to a food recipe.
“Cause marketing” can actually be an effective way for a brand to exhibit its values and connect with consumers. But it needs to be authentic. I’m aware that you probably can’t quite call Epicurious’ tweets above a serious attempt at quote-on-quote “cause marketing”, but at the very least it is an exhibit of sympathy and brand values that I think is closely tied to this marketing strategy.
So let’s talk about how a brand can do this right.
How to avoid this again:
Keep it simple: If your goal is to show care and support for people hurt in an incident… then just simply say that. Full stop.
Don’t tack on a promotion at the end. That is…well, tacky. People don’t want to be told that there are people eating cranberry scones as a way to communicate solidarity with Bostonians who just experienced horrific terrorism.
Do some actual charity: Don’t just pay lip service to caring about a cause. If you really want to authentically connect your brand to a local issue, then actually take some real action to demonstrate that. Action, not just cheap words, goes a long way in helping it not feel like thinly-veiled marketing ploy.
One positive example is LL Bean’s One Fund Tote bag. They sold out of the 3500 bags they produced, made out of Fenway Park tarp, and donated 100% of proceeds which totalled $114,000 to the One Fund, established to support Marathon Bombing victims. This also followed a $150,000 they made immediately after the bombing — which adds credibility to their authenticity in caring about the incident.
In the case of Epicurious, they don’t need a significant initiative like L.L. Bean’s decision to come out with a special product in order to take authentic action. They could organize a lunch-time fundraiser among employees that perhaps shows up on social media. Or they can make a corporate donation and tweet to encourage followers to make a contribution as well. The key is to not try to tie cause marketing back to a product in a direct, obvious, and thus insincere way. They should only use cause marketing to communicate brand values and strengthen their long-term relationship with their audiences.
This post is part of a blog series for a class I’m taking at MIT Sloan called “Social Media Management.” For this blog post, we were asked to talk about a “brand fail” on social media.
