A beauty white crisis
What is beauty? Everyone has different definitions of it, but Seoul secret, a Thai whitening product, caused a great controversy worldwide because of an advertisement of their whitening supplementary products. Why? Because this Ad shows an Asian woman turning black, to her apparent displeasure, another whiter version of woman says that “Just being white, you will win.” Even allowing for any cultural difference., this Ad was always going to cause a storm. The video, which began to spread on the web, has been heavily criticized among Thais, for its awful, racist message promoting white skin. Another one-minute video released by Seoul secret on YouTube shows a local superstar Crise Horwang speaking about how she owes her success in the entertainment industry to heaving white skin.
At the beginning, Seoul secret didn’t respond to these critical comments, they just shut down the comments below video on YouTube. But as the situation continues to ferment, the pressure of public opinion becomes more and more heavy. Seoul secret had to come out and respond to their inappropriate comments. “Seoul Secret, as the rightful owner of the video clip, would like to apologize for the mistake, and claim full responsibility for this incident. Our company did not have any intention to convey discriminatory or racist messages,” the statement said, “What we intended to convey was that self-improvement in terms of personality, appearance, skills, and professionality is crucial.” This “heart-felt apology” helped stem the tide of events, but the damage to the company was clear.
Although Seoul Secret reacted to its inappropriate remarks and largely contained the situation, it had to admit that this was a serious brand PR crisis. Even if Seoul Secret offered a sincere apology, it could not avoid the damage of the company’s brand caused by the delayed response. The bad comments on the Internet didn’t make them realize the seriousness of the problem in the first place. Despite the apology was successful, they are still in a passive position in dealing with the crisis.
I think if the company has a good vision and structure, such a simple mistake can be completely avoided. The problem of Seoul Secret is that they narrowly define their customer base as Asian women but ignore women of other races as their customers. They do not have a good global vision and underestimate the power of the Internet to spread information. This is the root cause of their mistakes.
In the digital world, I think the marketing and public relations departments of companies should share the responsibility accordingly. First of all, the Marketing Department of the company has a deviation in defining the customer base of the product. Such inaccurate positioning is the reason for the ambiguity of advertising in the later promotion of the product. On the other hand, the public relations department of the company did not respond timely enough when dealing with emergencies. Although the final apology letter relieved the crisis, it inevitably caused damage to the company.
Reference:
