November 28th, 2008 by Nils Maier
Angry twittering moms can cause serious damage to the company and brands online reputation. The U.S Company Johnson and Johnson got the taste of it recently from a mass of outraged and twittering moms. The creative approach of the marketers on the subject strains caused by a baby carrier/sling and Motrinas the perfect problem solution, were found way too offensive by the majority of moms. After all, for moms, it is more about the undeniable powerful bond of being close to their babies whenever possible and less about sore muscles caused by carrying them.
The storm of outrage started in particular through Twitter and You Tube, where young angered moms exchanged their opinions about the offensive and disrespectful ad. AdvertisingAge gives a short overview about how it all started, from one posting up to masses of protest against the brand:
The beginning of the end for the Motrin push probably came Friday (14.11) night, when Los Angeles blogger Jessica Gottlieb said she was tipped off to the ads and started expressing her outrage over the campaign on Twitter, where she has 1,018 followers…On Saturday (15.11), Katja Presnal (4,221 Twitter followers), a New York blogger and proprietor of online children’s clothing store Skimbaco, collected tweets from offended moms and edited them into a nine-minute video on YouTube titled “Motrin Ad Makes Moms Mad,” which had been viewed 21,000 times as of today.
The Motrin campaign got off on the wrong foot with the wrong bloggers, namely mommy bloggers, which led to an immense danger of the brand’s online reputation in within only 2 days after the campaign kicked off. So basically marketers and PR executives should always keep in mind, to take each posting seriously, because it does not take much of influencer for an issue to end up as a crisis.
This communication crisis of J&J shows that Twitter has become a great a challenge for communicators in the realms of issue and reputation management. No other medium has this kind of online influencer’s concentration.
The marketers responsible for the advertising had no other choice than to pull off the campaign after that PR disaster and issued a public apology to all the offended women.
As I mentioned in my previous posting, most companies take social media as a relevant channel after they fell flat on their nose and not before. So I am quite curious, if in the future J&J would take social media more seriously into their communication efforts.
