ChasNote

An agency friend asked for my take on the recent dust-up over Motrin’s campaign targeting new moms. As I see it, Motrin made two blunders. One, old-fashioned bad creative in a post-Internet world. Two, when the campaign upset its customers, it demanded that those customers come to Motrin’s website to get their apology. Excerpts from my note below.

One:
The ad creative was careless. There’s no question that carrying a baby, or pushing a baby stroller, or going sleepless for weeks, can cause pain that lots of us parents take Motrin to alleviate. But by talking about slings as a trendy fashion accessory, they overlooked that many parents see slings as vital equipment for an approach to parenting that those parents take very seriously (see Attachment Parenting). We’d never talk about clothing-based religious practices as “fashion accessories.” I’d argue that to the attachment parenting community, calling slings “fashion” is an insult of similar magnitude. This was bad copy-writing, full stop.

I’m guessing no one worried too much about sloppy, perhaps insensitive copy-writing because it was a traditional ad buy. There was no “social media strategy,” so don’t worry about it. TV and print and standard banner ads are one-way, so who cares? The reality is: Social media happens to you whether or not you have a strategy. (I stole that line from Pete Spande.) If you have strategy, you are in the conversation and you prepare for the conversation. If you don’t have a strategy, your customers have the conversation without you, and when it goes in the wrong direction, you join the conversation late and defensively. Motrin landed in the latter situation.

Two:
When Motrin’s customers got pissed, they voiced their discontent on the social media platforms where they “live” online. Yet Motrin did not go “visit” those customers (ie, joining the Twitter conversation, right there on Twitter) to apologize. It required those angry customers to come to Motrin.com to get an apology. It should have syndicated the apology, published it on Twitter with @jessicagotleib and #motrinmoms, and published it as a comment on the most influential blogs that joined and accelerated the conversation.