Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Motrin encapsulated

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AdAge has a case study on the Motrin ad flap today (hat tip Queen of Spain) that characterizes Motrin’s decision to pull the babywearing ad as caving to “a vocal flash mob.”

It has lots and lots of great numbers to show that not that many people saw the ad. True enough, and I urge everyone to bookmark the article for the Twitter stats alone. Twitter isn’t mainstream, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it is. Useful? Promising? Trendy? Yes. But mainstream? Not yet. Maybe not ever.

However, from an advertising perspective, the Motrin team did the absolutely right and responsible thing. The ad offended, no matter how small the number. It pulled it.  Last week, Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Healthcare Kathy Widmer wrote on JNJ BTW, the company’s corp comm blog and motrin.com:

So…it’s been almost 4 days since I apologized here for our Motrin advertising. What an unbelievable 4 days it’s been. Believe me when I say we’ve been taking our own headache medicine here lately!

Btw – if you’re confused by this – we removed our Motrin ad campaign from the marketplace on Sunday because we realized through your feedback that we had missed the mark and insulted many moms. We didn’t mean to…but we did. We’ve been able to get most of the ads out of circulation, but those in magazines will, unfortunately, be out there for a while.

We are listening to you, and we know that’s the best place to start as we move ahead. More to come on that.

In the end, we have been reminded of age-old lessons that are tried and true:

  • When you make a mistake – own up to it, and say you’re sorry.
  • Learn from that mistake.

That’s all… for now.

I wish more marketers would be as responsible and responsive to their customers as McNeil has been here.

RSS Feed Experiment

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Just because people subscribe to a feed, doesn’t mean they read it. So I’ve been conducting an experiment of sorts. Not particularly scientific and absolutely no baseline measure, so consider it more anecdotal than anything else.

As regular readers know, about a month ago, I moved Marketing Roadmaps to the WordPress platform from TypePad but I did not redirect my Feedburner feed. This was a deliberate choice, as I am convinced that feeds — especially feeds that have been active for four years as the original Roadmaps one was — accumulate waste circulation. This is people who have subscribed to the blog in multiple feed readers, probably serially, as they bounce from reader to reader. I wanted to stop carrying these dupes.

I’ll use myself as an example. When I started reading blogs, I used the Bloglines feedreader. When Google introduced its feedreader, I switched over to it, and then about a year or so ago, I switched to Newsgator. When I switched however I did not unsubscribe the abandoned readers from the feeds. So there are a significant number of feeds to which I am subscribed at least twice, possibly three times.

While I generally refrain from assuming that my behavior is reflective of the rest of the population, in this case, I think my pattern is pretty typical for the small 11% of the online population that uses feedreaders (Forrester data.)

How much waste is there in my old feed? A month into the cut-over, subscribers to the new Marketing Roadmaps feed are about 6% of the total number of subscribers to the old feed. Since this is totally unscientific research, we can’t make the correlation that only 6% have re-subscribed, but I will bet that it isn’t far from the truth.

What does that tell us?  I make no claim that my results are indicative of anything other than my blog and its audience.  However, my data hints that feedreader subscriber numbers are very inflated, especially for long running blogs, and may not be the best basis for evaluating a blog’s readership or creating ranking systems. If used at all, feed reader subscribers should not be weighted heavily.

Further substantiation. The number of visitors and unique visitors per month to the old TypePad site in August and September, the last two full months of its life as the active blog, and to the new site in its first full month are about the same. Traffic to the TypePad site is also falling off.  While this is all extremely unscientific and has absolutely no statistical validity, it does support my belief that the readers who read my blog on the blog is a fairly stable number, and most have followed over to read at the new site.

How useful is my data? What can other people extrapolate? A lot or a little I suppose, depending on how honest you want to be about how many readers are actually, regularly reading your blogs. It’s up to you.

For myself,  I have a great deal of confidence that I truly know how many regular readers Marketing Roadmaps has. Thanks for sticking with me. You know who you are 🙂

Change?

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What changes do I think the Obama administration will bring? That’s the meme with which I was recently tagged by David Wescott.

Hopefully, there will be a slew of political and policy changes that will make this country a better place to live and less of a joke overseas. Hopefully, we will edge closer to universal health care. Hopefully, the badly-listing ship that is our economy will right itself, the slip-slide of the Supreme Court to the far-right will be reversed and we’ll find a way out of the Iraqi conflict sooner rather than later. But those are all simply hopes for change. There are many more factors at play than one man, one administration and a stirring call to change, “Yes we can.”

What interests me from a marketing and social media perspective is a fundamental change that has already happened that makes these hopes realistic. As David says in his post, Obama understood that the instant communication and connectivity made possible by mobile and social media technologies fundamentally changed the nature of the game:

President-elect Obama didn’t create this change. He’s said so himself. He simply understood its existence. He used the tools people use today to communicate with each other, and by doing so he convinced us he knows politics is not a lecture.

Now he has to prove he gets it, and I’m not just talking about social media. We’re long past the point where you convince people you get it by publishing a blog or putting together a spiffy YouTube channel. They’re just tools. He’ll have to listen and respond. (emphasis mine, not David’s)

Ah, that’s the key. Use the tools to listen. And respond. Not simply to broadcast your point of view.

That’s the real interactive change I see in an incoming Obama administration. The key players — all the way up to the man himself — actively use the tools themselves. One of the top transition stories this week has been whether Obama will be able to keep his beloved Blackberry. An NPR segment yesterday described Attorney General designate Eric Holder as a “technology junkie.” It’s been widely reported that Obama intends to have a laptop in the Oval Office, another first.

Contrast that to an increasingly disconnected, soon-to-be-former President GW Bush who admitted in 2003 that he doesn’t read newspapers and the stunningly uninformed Sarah Palin who couldn’t recall the name of a single newspaper she reads.

This means that there’s a better than average chance that the incoming administration “gets it,” that they understand that our democracy requires a conversation with the American public, not a benevolent (?) dictator deciding what is best for the American public.

It isn’t that they used Twitter in the campaign or that the weekly address to the nation will be archived on YouTube. Both of those things are cool, but politicians have been embracing online tools, with varying degrees of success, for some time now. That’s not the change.

The change is that these communication tools, which are so much a part of our lives, are also part of theirs. These tools that we use to stay informed, to collaborate, to converse, to respectfully disagree, to battle it out, to reach consensus, to connect are their tools too. They don’t cut themselves off from the rapid flow of information. Like us, they revel in the hum of the Blackberry that says new email has arrived.

For all these reasons, I want to believe, I really do, that the first and most important change of an Obama administration is that the President-elect understands that the President is the representative by, for, and of the people. Our proxy, not our replacement.

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Final snarky aside: Of course, it helps that Obama was actually elected president, versus being named president. I can see how the Bush administration got confused there.

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Oops. Forgot to tag some others. I’d like to read what KD Paine, Elisa Camahort Page and Doug Haslam think. What changes will an Obama administration bring?

Does the momosphere reflect moms?

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In the comments here there and everywhere on the Motrin ad flap, a common theme was that the online moms — momosphere, Twitter moms, whatever — were NOT representative of moms in general.

Which of course got me thinking. How representative IS the momosphere? My gut tells me that it is highly influential and increasingly representative. And when it comes to extremely sensitive issues, like breastfeeding and babywearing, even more so.

But my gut instinct may not be enough for the average Fortune 500 company. While that’s a pity, I get it.

So, let’s prove it.  I know it is there. Please send me links to whatever hard data you have about moms and the blogosphere. I’ll pull it all together in a follow-up post. I’ve got bits and pieces, but that’s not enough.

What we really need is a data. And a market research firm willing to support the question. Any takers?

Thanks!

The #motrinmoms lesson

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I was offline most of the day yesterday at a dog club event so missed the tweetstorm around the Motrin babywearing commercial. If you aren’t familiar with the tale, Amy Gates, Katja Presnal and Robert French have the full story.

Short version: Motrin created what it must have thought was a humourous ad targeted at babywearing moms. Except the target audience didn’t think it was so funny. In fact, it was offended, and in my opinion, rightly so. Among other things, the copy was condescending and rang completely false.

Tweetstorm. Blogstorm. Motrin apologizes and takes video down.

And the analysis begins. While most of the reaction I’ve seen so far understands the fundamental marketing errors, even as I am catching up on the story, Shannon McKarney points out on Twitter, there is a chorus of folks who don’t get it and class the #motrinmoms reaction, and action, as overreacting.

So I thought it would be helpful to the slower students to review some fundamental issues.

The ad was targeted at babywearing moms. Lots of babywearing moms didn’t like it. That’s a FAIL. Full stop.  Doesn’t matter whether some babywearing moms didn’t mind it or non-parents thought it was funny. If you fail to connect with a significant portion of your audience, your ad has failed. Extra demerits when, as in this case, you not only fail to engage, you actively piss them off.

Much of the online commentary I’ve seen so far has been on the power of the social networks. That consumer brands should take heed of them. Or not, at their peril. True enough. I agree, but the power here is not simply the network. It’s the community. The technology — the Internet, Twitter, blogs, YouTube etc — just helped the outrage build and spread further faster.

For which McNeil should be grateful. An ad as fundamentally bad as the babywearing one would have offended 20 years ago too.  It just would have taken longer for the boycott to spread, and for the company to react, during which time sales might have really suffered. At least here, they can begin damage control sooner rather than later.

The power of the parent-blogging community makes crystal clear the consumer power of moms. The technology simply gives us new tools and new ways to wield it.  We don’t just vote with our pocketbooks. We use our voices too.

Some social media consultants probably will use this example as “further proof” that bloggers are “dangerous” and brands must hire them to navigate the dangerous waters.  While I agree that it wouldn’t hurt the big brands to get a little expert help (I’m available), especially if they plan to do proactive outreach, it shouldn’t be out of fear or worry that bloggers will attack. That only tends to happen when brands don’t do their homework.

Make sure there’s water in the pool before you jump.

In this case, of course, McNeil wasn’t reaching out to bloggers. And that’s the second important part of the lesson. Why not?

It’s not a big secret that the mom-blogging community is large, active and increasingly powerful. Mainstream media has written stories about it. Johnson’s, another unit of corporate parent J&J, had a much publicized mom blogger event last spring. There are bloggers with babywearing in the blog title so it’s not like it would be really hard to find a few 🙂

It’s always a good idea to put your listening ears on and apply a little common sense. The team behind this ad clearly didn’t do either, or it would have known that babywearing is an issue about which many moms are very very passionate. The ad’s content and tone were quite simply wrong. FAIL.

Why didn’t it ask a few babywearing moms to weigh in on the ad? Or maybe even be in it? I can think of quite a few reasons why moms might want to take a painkiller, and real voices would have rung so much truer than the chipper voiceover in the ad.

It might not have been as funny… but then again, it wasn’t really funny anyway, was it?

Now, McNeil and the Motrin team have an opportunity to turn this around. I hope they take it.