Two Edges

There was a story online this week that really points out how suddenly going viral after spending years as a mundane and obscure company has become something of a two-edged sword. Having a product or company “go viral” – meaning that some online reference to the company spread suddenly across the Internet, as though it was a fast-breeding virus striking a community with no resistance to the strain – has become the new standard to which all online (and a remarkable amount of real-world) advertising aspires. To go viral – to have an ad or even a reference that cost you only pennies to make suddenly catch the attention of millions or tens of millions of potential customers sounds wonderful enough; as though a single mention on a popular web site could make you a billionaire overnight. But the truth is, it doesn’t always work out that way…

Consider, for example, the case of Dublin Dr. Pepper, from the Dr. Pepper Bottling Company of Dublin, Texas. Dublin Dr. Pepper is just like regular Dr. Pepper in most respects, but instead of being sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup and other chemically altered or processed sweeteners, the Dublin version uses Imperial cane sugar. This made it an extremely popular product during the high-fructose wars of the last few years, and motivated people thousands of miles from Dublin, Texas to sample the product. The company and product spread like wildfire across the Internet, and orders began pouring in for the special version of the popular soft drink. This should have been a happy problem – and it might have been, if all of the Internet publicity hadn’t caught the attention of the company that owns Dr. Pepper…

It turns out that, like most soda bottlers, Dr. Pepper/Snapple has strict territory rules for where its bottling companies (who are mostly franchises) can sell their product. In the case of Dublin Dr. Pepper, the company’s territory was limited to a six-county area in Texas, and by selling the product over the Internet (to thousands of customers outside of that area) the company had violated the terms of their franchise. To make matters worse, the bottler had never received permission to use the name “Dublin Dr. Pepper” in the first place, and doing so was a trademark violation as well as an additional breach of their contract. The Dr. Pepper Snapple group sued in federal court last year, and eventually forced the company to accept a settlement that involved discontinuing both the Dublin Dr. Pepper name and sales of the customized product…

Now, we’ve discussed the concept of depending trademarks and copyrights before in this space, and it’s clear that any company has to defend such properties or risk losing them outright. What makes this case special is that the Dublin Dr. Pepper company had been in operation for over a century, and had been more or less left alone to do as it liked, largely because no one had ever heard of it outside of the six-county area in which it operates. When the company was discovered by online customers and went viral over the Internet it suddenly found itself experiencing demand beyond anything it had ever imagined – which eventually attracted the corporate interest and legal action that destroyed the product after more than a century of continuous operation…

I’m not saying that companies (including yours) shouldn’t attempt to make use of viral advertising, or that marketing efforts of this type are likely to stop appearing any time soon. But just like any other new business development, viral advertising can have consequences you never anticipated, and once you let something loose in cyberspace there’s no telling where it will go, or what the long-term effects will be. As always, it’s a good idea to consider how a given tool works before you try using it and accidentally cut yourself on it…