Whoever said that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, said so before the Pepsi and Kendall Jenner fiasco. There is most certainly examples of bad publicity and in an age where more and more consumers are using the dollars in their wallet to show support for the issues that matter the most to them, this is something that you have to behind as well if your business is going to weather bad storms when they come, and they will come.
Good Examples of Bad Publicity
If you do subscribe to the line of thought that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, consider some of these choices.
- Pepsi and Kendal Jenner. Remember that time that nationwide protests gave birth to the “Black Lives Matter” movement and then shortly after Pepsi screened a television ad that had Miss. Jenner joins a protest and then walks up to a policeman to give him a Pepsi? Yeah, we didn’t think so. That’s because Pepsi had to take the ad down faster than they ran it and the resulting backlash cost the company plenty. Plenty.
- How #deleteuber very nearly did, permanently. In 2017, Donald Trump banned migration to the United States from Muslim majority countries. This lead to a spate of protests all around the USA including at JFK airport in New York. Taxi drivers decided to show their support for these people and arranged a “go slow” where they wouldn’t collect fares for an hour. Uber decided that they would still collect passengers but not charge the premium rates usually charged during peak hours. The public viewed this as a “statement” of morality and launched the #deleteuber campaign and within hours, hundreds of thousands of users had deleted Uber from their mobile phones.
The internet is littered with really good, bad examples – go check them out. Even if you’re not in that league, don’t be fooled into thinking that a less than savvy decision no matter how innocent, can’t happen to you.
How to Deal
The first thing to do is to try and prevent it from happening at all.
You have to learn how the digital marketing world works because it’s only when you know the nature of the beast that you can begin to understand how to manage it.
But you do want lots of positive engagement with your customers and you never want to pick fights or arguments from a point of defense, also refrain from doing the whole “we are aware of the situation and we’ll be dealing with it in due course” scenario. Your customers want to know how you’re dealing with it and what you’re going to do to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. No matter how tempting it may be, never, ever make your customer look bad, nothing will rally the “troops” faster than a victim but always handle the situation. Owning your situation can go a long way, so you’ll be needing some tips to write a press release.
Overall… breathe and take it one step at a time.
You won’t be the first business to have made a faux pas and in this age of the social media warrior, you won’t be the last either.