The company provided what has come to be a boilerplate apology.
“We are deeply sorry to anyone who may take offense to this specific post,” the company said in a statement. “Diversity and equal opportunity are crucial values of Nivea.”
Within days it was Pepsi on the social media hot seat for an incredibly insensitive, incredibly white ad focusing on the Black Lives Matter protests.
The ad was pulled in hours, although, as you can see, nothing posted is ever truly deleted; here is Pepsi’s gussied up version of the boilerplate apology.
“Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark and apologize,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. “We did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are pulling the content and halting any further rollout.”
Nivea’s story was from an agency, while Pepsi’s was developed in-house.
While I’m no fan of social media in general and its penchant for spreading fake news, in this case the lightening reactions actually did some good.
Heineken is another story (pun intended) entirely and has the awards to prove it, so it isn’t surprising that it was Heineken that successfully created the story the others screwed up so badly.
The take-away is that stories are a two-edged sword, so be sure to do them outside the echo chamber or don’t do them.
Do you invite strangers into your home and let them to listen to your most personal conversations or view your most intimate moments?
Would you leave them alone with your kids to say what they pleased using unquotable language?
Would you stand by while they rummaged through your files copying what they pleased, leaving chaos behind and demanding payment so you could clean up the mess?
No?
Chances are you already do.
You invite them in with every connected device you buy.
In addition to storing the customer databases in a publicly accessible location, Spiral Toys also used an Amazon-hosted service with no authorization required to store the recordings, customer profile pictures, children’s names, and their relationships to parents, relatives, and friends.
Samsung’s smart refrigerator was hacked yielding up G-mail logins, which, in turn, can yield up your whole on-line life.
Besides the fridge, the hackers also found 25 vulnerabilities in 14 allegedly smart devices, including scales, coffee makers, wireless cameras, locks, home automation hubs, and fingerprint readers.
Pretty lame, considering that in January 2014 security was ranked as the top spending priority for CIOs and 75% said it would increase in 2015.
Makes you wonder what it was spent on.
European countries, such as Germany and Denmark, have strong privacy laws and simply ban these products, but I doubt our government will do more than hold hearings and wring their hands.
So it’s up to you.
Your major protection is very simple.
Don‘t buy connected devices unless you really can’t live without them.
For those you do buy don’t expect anything from the manufacturer.
Learn how to reset the passwords and choose strong ones.
Don’t use all-purpose logins, such as those from Facebook or Google — no matter how convenient they are.
It’s called “personal responsibility.”
If you’re not familiar with the idea ask your parents — or, more likely, your grandparents.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Have you ever been taken aback by the dichotomy between a company’s excellent product and its amateurish website or product sheets?
If you have, you are face-to-fact with an immature company.
And while important for consumer sales, M&S maturity is absolutely critical when selling to business — no matter the size of the enterprise.
This immaturity has nothing to do with years in business and everything to do with an immature business process with regards to sales and marketing.
If a potential customer meets something that’s immature, i.e., incompetent, in M&S, they will jump to the conclusion that the company is also incompetent in other areas.
That’s why look & feel are so important — we Americans, unlike most other countries, have grown up in a society where marketing is central, so in many ways looks are more important than substance.
Young companies are often immature; they hire sales people, but turn a blind eye to the need for doing the product marketing work first.
The shrug off lead generation/creation, lead nurturing, sales process, sales collateral that fit the process, key selling points against competitors, target user profile, target influencer profile, etc., and, worst of all, customer service.
These are the real underpinnings for success.
A lot to cover; a lot to do, but the payoff is significant.
After all, you don’t want your target customers to dismiss you because you look immature, do you?
“In the worldwide battle to get dog owners to clean up after their pets, enter Brunete, a middle-class suburb of Madrid fed up with dirty parks and sidewalks.”
Brunette’s mayor wanted a more creative solution that didn’t rely on substantial fines, because in tough economic times that fine could be the difference between eating and going hungry.
With the creative help of McCann Erickson, Brunete’s mayor tried a totally new approach to the poop—along the lines of ‘return to sender’.
Instead, this town engaged a small army of volunteers to bag it, box it and send it back to its owners. (…) Delivering 147 boxes of the real stuff seems to have produced a far more lasting effect in this town of about 10,000 residents. The mayor guesses a 70 percent improvement even now, several months after the two-week campaign.
The campaign wasn’t done as a surprise;
At first, Ricardo Rovira, who was part of the design team at the agency, worried that the mayor would not have the courage to go ahead with its direct marketing idea. But he did. McCann also made an amusing public awareness video, produced by Juan José Ocio, largely using actors. It was shown around town before concerts and community meetings.
According to Rovira, the campaign also netted McCann some real clients with serious money to spend.
This has been a fun little doing well by doing good story on a summer Wednesday that, hopefully, will inspire you/your company to DIY.
Going viral is every marketer’s goal, especially entrepreneurs with a new product/service/experience that needs to rise above the noise in order to be noticed.
Going viral requires some luck, as do most successes, even if it’s the serendipitous kind (right time/right place), but it’s mostly method, as discussed previously.
Research by Thales S. Teixeira, an assistant professor in marketing at HBS, identified “four key steps: attracting viewers’ attention, retaining that attention, getting viewers to share the ad with others, and persuading viewers.”
“The challenge lies in getting the best mix of all four ingredients and baking them into your ad.”
Read the article if you’re planning any kind of video/social media campaign; Teixeira’s insights and explanations will give you a much better shot at that success.
One of the problems is that entrepreneurs are so enamored with their products that they want to tell the world about it, so the world will love it, too.
But in a time of instant information availability and short attention spans, the world doesn’t care much about your product—it wants first and foremost to be entertained.
The research shows that if sharing an ad will somehow benefit the sender as much as it helps the advertiser, then the ad might go viral.
Things that tickle your funny-bone or touch your heart are always shared faster and longer than product facts.
Ask an entrepreneur how they are going to move their product and they’ll tell you that they are doing something “really cool” that will “go viral” and sometimes it actually does.
But why?
Why does one cat video garner a million views, while hundreds of others have only a few dozen?
Is there a silver bullet that assures your video will go viral?
Or at least a way to hedge your bets?
No to the first, but yes to the second.
A new book helps; it’s Jonah Berger’s ‘Contagious’: Why Things Catch On and I recommend it to anybody working to be heard through the noise.
I especially like the story of George Wright, a new marketing hire, who saw the potential in his CEO’s obsessive efforts to break the companies product.
But there’s a great example of a company, Blendtec, that actually made a blender video that’s gotten more than 10 million views…. They have a series of videos called “Will it blend?” — which has over 150 million views — where they stick all types of different things in a blender.
Not bad for what you have to admit is a pretty bland product.
This may be one of those times when the book is actually worth buying.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Have you ever been taken aback by the dichotomy between a company’s excellent product and its amateurish website or product sheets?
