Concealing, drinking, and bleaching away #brandfails
As a MBA studying social media and about to enter the retail/consumer products industry, here are 3 lessons I’ve learned about managing digital faux pas from a few of my favorite brands: Sephora, Bud Light, and Clorox.
Lesson #1 from Sephora: carefully manage your customers’ expectations, especially when launching a digital-first promotion.
Long before I interned there last summer on the digital team, I was in love with Sephora. There’s a lot to love about Sephora, but I was most in love with the Beauty Insider program, for which I was diligently hoarding my points in hopes of using them to treat myself with 500-point travel kits from my favorite brands.
I’m in good company as a point-hoarder. The behavior is common enough that Sephora took this consumer insight and decided to create an “Epic Rewards” promotion online, in which Beauty Insiders could cash in their loyalty points well beyond the usual 100, 250, and 500-point rewards and deplete their beauty banks for 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, and 10,000-point rewards. The 1,000-point rewards included $100–$200 worth of exclusive makeup and skincare. The 5K and 10K rewards went so far as to include designer handbags, beauty classes at the headquarters of elite beauty brands, and even a trip to Paris:
Needless to say, the promo generated serious social media buzz.
On August 10, 2015, Epic Rewards launched and the namesake rewards sold out in a matter of minutes, leading to equally epic customer outcry against the brand:
Sephora as a brand goes beyond commanding loyalty — it commands fanaticism. And because Sephora knows what customers want and how to deliver it to them, it’s baffling that the company didn’t better manage expectations on the availability of these rewards (which were obviously scarce — I doubt Sephora was planning to fly more than one woman to Lancome, Paris).
Doing the Epic Rewards as a lottery or sweepstakes — or at least doing some marketing to remind customers not to take the perk availability as a given — would have easily mitigated the customer outrage. In the end, Sephora gave $50 gift codes to all those who were disappointed by being unable to redeem an epic reward. $50/customer is small price to pay , likely too small to have measurably impacted the company’s bottom line given the average basket size of a Sephora client. Still, with events like these, it makes me wonder if Sephora really understands the effect it has on people — and the amount of stress it imposes on its very, very small social media team.
Lesson #2 from Bud Light: Your target customer isn’t the only one watching — or drinking — and when you have the resources to influence a huge number of people, use the power responsibly.
I’ll never forget years ago when Dr. Pepper released a commercial spot of a man on a motorbike claiming, “You can keep the romantic comedies and lady drinks. “We’re good.” At the conclusion of the a mock action movie sequence, he declares, “Dr. Pepper 10: It’s Not for Women.” In an interview, nearly four years since the airing of the spot, I asked a brand manager for Dr. Pepper 10 about the reasoning behind the tagline and stood agape at his response. The team had seen their target market as men (this was a men’s low-calorie cola, after all) but appeared to neglect the fact that women have TVs, too, and women could also see this commercial. And be furious about it.
I wish I could interview a Bud Light brand manager at AB-Inbev and ask the same about #upforwhatever.
Last spring, Bud Light bottles sported a special statement on some labels describing the brew as, “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night.” The bottle debacle came barely a month after Bud’s infamous St. Patrick’s Day tweet, “On #StPatrickDay you can pinch people who don’t wear green. You can also pinch people who aren’t #UpForWhatever.”
The Bud Light team’s operating assumption here seems analogous to that of the team at Dr. Pepper: “Women aren’t the primary drinkers of Bud Light; therefore they won’t see the marketing materials associated with it, from the commercial on TV to the label on the bottle to the hashtag on Twitter, this label on the bottle.” Much like Dr. Pepper’s gaffe, Bud Light’s could have been avoided with more women in the room to weigh in on the marketing decisions. Even if women are not the primary target market, as half of the population, it’s naive to assume women would never have seen this campaign and been offended.
But the implications of Bud Light’s marketing are even more worrisome than Dr. Pepper’s overt sexism and implied misogyny: it’s not a big leap of logic to interpret #upforwhatever as something far more sinister as being #upfor a great night out with the bros. From where I and many others stand, #upforwhatever is a multimillion dollar marketing campaign that condones “removing ‘no’ from the vocabulary” of women under the influence and rape culture.
Beer brands use their power and influence to remind drinkers to drink responsibly, but few note that this responsibility goes beyond, “Don’t Drink and Drive.” And when you have enough money to influence people that strongly with your brand, it’s imperative to use the powers for good.
Lesson #3 from Clorox: one word can make all the difference between a positively engaged audience and a positively outraged one
It’s not easy to build buzz around household items on social media, but Clorox has managed to do it. In 2012, Clorox’s “Bleach It Away” campaign drove 13MM social media impressions and nearly 22K “bleachable moment” stories submitted, according to PRDaily.
Last year, when Apple got a new lineup of 300 emojis, Clorox tweeted “New emojis are alright but where’s the bleach.” Someone on that social media team clearly didn’t realize that many of the newly-released emojies were diversity emojis, adding to the color spectrum of the cartoon people emojis. Clorox’s original tweet (left) and its triage response (right) are below:
One word could have been enough to prevent the social media outcry. Changing the statement to “New household emojis are alright but where’s the bleach?” “New emojis are alright but where’s the bleach emoji?” would have been enough to prevent responses like these:
All of which is to say, if you’ve got 140 characters, make them count more than make them offend.
Curious about the implications of social media for “business” in my final semester of my MBA, I decided to enroll in a class called “Social Media Management.” This is the third of ten posts I am writing as a part of this course analyzing the past, present, and future of social media.
