Think It Through

There are times when I really wish I had chosen to study Marketing in business school instead of Management. The first time, at MBA level, I still believed that there was a place in the world for a generalist who just wants to get on with the job at hand. The second time, I was looking for the answer to why the senior management teams of otherwise perfectly good companies keep running their firms directly into the ground, and it seemed reasonable to study the actions and strategies of the senior managers themselves. And, of course, both times through I knew I didn’t have the math for it. But quite apart from that, and leaving out the absurd bias my former department has against applied research (and the practitioners who apply it), I have noted a large number of the aforementioned management failures that relate directly to marketing decisions that even a reasonably bright six-year-old would have known better than to make…

A case in point would be Burger King’s attempt at a marketing tweet this week. I picked up the story from USA Today, but you can find details about it all over the Internet as of today. Actually a series of three tweets, the first one said “Women belong in the kitchen.” The second one pointed out that women comprise only about 20% of all professional chefs, and the third tweet introduced a new Burger King program to provide scholarships for women attending culinary schools – thus correcting the shortfall. It’s a marketing/public relations move that has some real potential, timed to coincide with International Women’s Day 2021, but whoever came up with it seems to have missed just how badly the first tweet would be received – and how likely people were to ignore tweets two and three, particularly if they were already angered by tweet number one…

It seems possible that the company was attempting to emulate the success that Wendy’s has already had with their company’s Twitter account, which has become known (if not exactly famous) for its humorously sarcastic tweets over the last few years. Unfortunately, whoever came up with this triple tweet appears to be unfamiliar with the convention of indicating a multipart tweet by putting the notation 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3, or however many tweets the message takes up. They’re also ignoring the tendency of people to stop reading something that angers them, as well as the fact that this particular message is neither sarcastic nor amusing…

Now, I don’t mean to imply that if I had a Marketing degree I would be able to tell any company when their attempt at being hip, edgy, or at least relevant was about to crater. But this isn’t the first attempt at Twitter advertising or other online marketing attempts to fly wide of the mark, and it isn’t even Burger King’s first absurdly offensive failed marketing attempt. Regular readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) will recall an earlier post about a Burger King ad featuring a new oblong burger product and a woman’s face apparently looking at it with an expression that could be interpreted as awe, fear, or revulsion, depending on your point of view…

It doesn’t take a lot of familiarity with failure analysis, let alone a graduate degree in Marketing, to recognize that the company has an unfortunate history with advertising that is not as clever or funny as they think it is, or that any future attempts at witty, edgy, or viral advertising are likely to attract greater scrutiny than they seem to have expected. You have to wonder if the person operating the Burger King  twitter feed ran this idea past anyone else – and if so, whether the “anyone else” included any actual women. Or, for that matter, anyone who had ever met an actual woman…

Other authors have written about the propensity of supposedly brilliant leaders in movies and television programs to formulate elaborate plans in which any ordinary six-year-old would be able to find obvious flaws, and suggested that if they ever have the chance to be the “evil overlord” or equivalent they will run all of their plans such an individual. It seems excessive to suggest that the senior management at Burger King should consider the same advice, but if they want the advice of a scruffy blogger who used to teach Business Strategy at a top business school, I do have some time available…

It's a Stunt

Over the weekend, the International House of Pancakes, or IHOP, as they are often called, announced a temporary change in their name to IHOB, without any indication of what that was supposed to mean. Today we learned that the “B” stands for “Burgers,” and the temporary measure is part of the launch of their new line of burgers. There’s been the amount of chatter you would probably expect out there in cyberspace, or at least in the comments sections of the various articles about this promotion, with some customers claiming that the last thing they want to smell in the morning while at breakfast would be burgers cooking, while others applaud the “free” publicity the stunt is generating. Personally, I’m disappointed…

You can pick up some of the articles about this promotion here or here, if you have a mind to. My personal disappointment stems from the fact that IHOP has already got a number of burgers on their menu, including two of the ones they are pushing for this new promotion. I haven’t been in to an IHOP location to see if they’ve really added anything new, but I’ve been eating one of the products mentioned by name in the Market Watch article for years now – pretty much any time we go to IHOP at a non-breakfast time of the day and I don’t feel like eating chicken and waffles…

Now, I would be the first to admit that it is difficult for an established brand like IHOP to change its public image after this many years. At least three generations of customers (possibly five by now) have associated the company’s restaurants with breakfast foods served more or less 24/7, with a smattering of other menu items for people who may not want to eat pancakes at three in the afternoon. This ignores the fact that the IHOP menu is made up of at least as many non-breakfast items as the more traditional faire with which it is associated, or that the company’s biggest advantage is probably the same reliable uniformity that supports most other national chain restaurants, rather than pancakes, waffles, and bizarrely-named breakfast specials. I’m skeptical about the current promotion, however…

It isn’t difficult to figure out that a restaurant chain most closely associated with breakfast foods would want to promote its non-breakfast options in an attempt to increase customer traffic at the other times of the day. In fact, IHOP has been running television spot (and in earlier times radio and print media ads as well) for as long as I can remember, without any noticeable change to its customer demographics or peak operations times. I couldn’t tell you for sure without auditing their books – and nearly all of the IHOP locations are franchised, so even that might not help – but it would appear that the company is going to need more than advertising stunts to change these stats…

What, exactly, the company could do to draw more customers for lunch and dinner shifts isn’t clear from the articles, or from my observations as a long-time customer, for that matter. Without bar facilities available they can’t really expect to take on Chili’s, TGI Fridays, Red Robin, or the other players in that segment, and with kitchen operations (mostly) limited to frying things or toasting things it’s difficult to see what other segments they could move into. They can’t attempt to implement greater differentiation without massive upgrades to their facilities and equipment, and if they attempt to go low cost they run the risk of bumping into McDonald’s and Burger King on the low end, or losing market share to Denny’s and Waffle House in their current segment, or possibly both…

It should be interesting to see whether this promotion will lead IHOP into a major change in menu, marketing, or operational strategy – or whether it’s just another marketing stunt that no one will remember by this fall…

Blade Wars

For some time now we’ve been seeing ads on television and various other media for new companies that are selling razors and shaving products over the Internet. I’ve been watching them with some interest, both because I use such products myself and also because this is a product category that has suffered from artificially inflated prices for as long as I’ve been old enough to shave. Whether this is an isolated case or if it turns out to have relevance to other product categories remains to be seen, but at the very least it would appear that the traditional strategic advantages are no longer quite as sustainable as you might think…

Fox Business is reporting that Gillette’s share of the men’s shaving market has been dropping for at least the last six years – from nearly 70% in 2010 to 54% in 2016, and possibly still dropping. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been any reason why other companies could not have challenged Gillette’s domination of the industry, any more than other companies could have challenged Frito-Lay for control of the potato chip and corn chip industry. But as in the case of salty snacks, it can be very difficult for a new competitor to break into an industry that already has an entrenched competitor with vendors, distributors, retailers, and the majority of the end users already its control. The purchase of Gillette by Proctor and Gamble in 2005 only made things that much harder for anyone else who might have thought to break into the market…

As a result, Gillette has been selling razor cartridges for as much as $6 each, and is in the middle of testing and introducing new extensions to the product line that might go even higher. It has become something of a running joke in recent years that the company keeps adding blades and jacking up the price. And while exactly how much of the price was made up of profit margin remains in dispute, it has not been much of a surprise to learn that the well-known Schick competing products run for as little as 50% of the Gillette equivalent’s price. Finding out that the cheapest Dollar Shave Club refill cartridge goes for as little as 20 cents was rather more surprising, to be sure, but what was really amazing was seeing the full-page ad in the newspapers responding to the new competition…

You can see one of the examples at Campaign Outsider if you’d like to. Gillette was already planning to answer the shave clubs delivery/convenience advantage by launching their own subscription service, but apparently the threat posed by the price advantage has caught their attention as well, and they are now publicly announcing upcoming price reductions across their product line. If the Fox Business story is correct, this should amount to an average reduction of about 12% on Gillette shaving products. Whether this will be enough to counter the 90% price advantage offered by the new online competition remains to be seen, of course…

Now, I’m not saying that the new price reductions won’t work, or that the success of the new shave clubs will bring additional competition into the market. I don’t begin to have enough data to make any such predictions, and I’m not sure anybody else does, either. For all that the situation is a classic example of a previously dominant company having to deal with an unexpected entrant crashing their market, the use of an Internet-based campaign and a direct-billed subscription model, not to mention home delivery, is almost literally unprecedented in this industry and product category. I can’t see any reason it shouldn’t work, and I’m not sure there’s anything Gillette or P&G can do about it – except compete with the newcomers on their own terms, that is…

Gillette is still entrenched in the market; their product is available in virtually every supermarket, drug store, convenience story, and general merchandise retailer in this country. They’ve got the technology and knowledge-base to create superior products, the distribution channels to get them into any customer’s hands, and the capital to run better ads and set whatever price points they can get away with. It seems possible for them to compete in this market and win, especially with the support of their corporate parent. What they can’t do is ignore the threat that these new competitors represent. The way they have been doing until now…

Sucker Showcase

Many years ago, the original cast of Saturday Night Live did a sketch about a game show called “Irwin Mainway’s Sucker Showcase” during which the host would tell various credulous idiots (the titular “suckers”) various obvious lies in order to get them to humiliate and/or injure themselves. It’s a variation on the old idea that people will do literally anything in order to get on television or win money; when you combine the two there’s almost nothing that is too obviously stupid to keep people from doing it. Dan Ackroyd was the MC (Irwin Mainway) and Steve Martin was the show’s “returning champion” – e.g., somebody so dim that he couldn’t figure out the show’s true nature even after enduring an episode of it. Steven Martin later included the sketch in his own T.V. special; you can find the clip here: https://youtu.be/4Hi8DIEhb_o

What seems most remarkable to me isn’t so much how prescient this sketch turns out to have been as how much more honest the format is, to the viewers if not to the contestants. Modern reality television has subjected contestants to activities at least this unpleasant, and potentially even more hazardous to life and limb, starting with shows like “Fear Factor” and “Survivor” and continuing to the current day. But where the fictional Irwin Mainway and whatever heartless production company was behind him were openly making fun of people, and inviting their audience to laugh at these suckers/contestants, the modern reality show hosts (and, one assumes, producers) go on endlessly about how exciting and competitive their contests are, and how well their contestants are dealing with the challenges involved…

Now, I would be the first to admit that this isn’t a new idea. A number of television series have based episodes around the concept over the years, and there are at least three full-length movies of which I’m aware that have been released on the same themes. I will also admit, however, that I have started worrying about the long-term effects of both encouraging people to be credulous idiots and encouraging other people to watch them and laugh. As the world becomes more complicated all around us it gets easier every year to make an innocent mistake that can screw up your entire life. Even ten years ago if you lost your cell phone, the worst that would happen is that you would report it as lost/stolen, have the carrier deactivate the account and give you a new one, and buy a new phone. If you’d bothered to sign up for the insurance, they’d just give you a new one. Today that same phone could allow someone to drain your bank account and max out all of your credit cards before you noticed it was gone…

I point this out for a number of reasons, not least of which is I’m worried about the corrosive effect this is having on our society; however, the effects on business, and particularly on business strategy, may be even worse. Business runs on information, even more so than money, and without complete and accurate information it isn’t possible to plan your activities or make competent decisions. If you base your calculations on bad data there is no way you can possibly get the right answers (the infamous programmer’s term GIGO – garbage in, garbage out – comes into play here), and with people deliberately introducing nonsensical information into reference sources just for the fun of watching more people behave like credulous idiots it’s getting harder every day just to tell what is real and what is supposed to be humor…

Earlier this week I noticed a clickbait item trumpeting that Don Knotts had just blurted out his “real” reasons for leaving the Andy Griffith Show. Which sounds like minor celebrity gossip, at best, until you realize that Mr. Knotts has been dead for eleven years as of today’s writing, and he revealed the complete rationale for leaving the show in the early 1970s. Heaven only knows what kinds of malware or online scams you might be subjecting yourself to if you clicked on that link, but the one thing I’m fairly sure of is that if you did click on it you would not have learned anything about the late Don Knotts that everybody else didn’t know forty years ago. If you make a practice of clicking on such links you probably won’t learn anything else, either, but you’ll definitely have qualified for an appearance on the next Irwin Mainway production when it comes out…

And that’s still not even the worst of it…

Yet Another Bad Choice

Several times over the past few years I’ve written in this space about the frequently baffling marketing programs attempted by the Burger King Corporation, and the backlash from both the consumers and their own franchise holders as a result of these occasional crimes against good taste. The “Freaky King” ads alone would be enough to make me want to fire my ad agency, but after episodes like the marginally obscene print ads for their foot-long burger and internal management fiascos like demanding that their franchisees sell products for below cost in order to align with national advertising campaigns, I have begun to question why the people running this company haven’t been committed for their own safety. And then I learned that the company had decided to open their newest overseas operation by insulting the royal family of the country they are just about to launch in…

According to an article on the BBC News site, Burger King is about to start operating in Belgium, and have been running an online ad that asks people to choose between a picture of the “Freaky King” mascot character and a picture of King Philippe, the actual monarch of that country, under the heading of “Who is the King?” Apparently, if you select the picture of the actual King, you get a pop-up message asking if you’re sure about that, considering that he’s not the one who will be cooking your fries. A spokesman for the Royal Family has issued a statement saying that they do not approve of this tactic, and would not have given permission for Burger King to make use of the King’s image if anyone had actually asked them…

I’m not familiar with Belgian popular culture, so I can’t tell you what level of offense this ad campaign with rise to with the people being subjected to it. There are places in the world where the royal family would simply ignore this kind of thing, and consider it nothing more than part of being a public figure in an increasingly vulgar world. There are other countries where this sort of campaign would result in the company being sued, banished from the kingdom, or just having all of their local assets confiscated and all of its local management team jailed. And there are other places in the world where this sort of thing might result in outraged subjects boycotting the company, marching in protest, setting fire to their in-country locations, or burning local managers in effigy (or possibly in person)…

What isn’t clear to me is why any company would take such an approach in the first place. In any nation where their actual king is a beloved figure this will be taken as a cultural insult, and in any place where there is a totalitarian government this would be considered an actual incitement to insurrection in the streets (which it actually might be). But regardless of the population’s actual relationship with their monarchy, it’s hard for me to imagine any circumstances under which this type of advertising would be considered a sly in-joke as opposed to yet another tone-deaf attempt by a particularly ugly American company to appropriate some part of the local culture in order to sell food products that are potential health risks…

I’ve read the same things you have about there being no such thing as bad publicity, and to some degree that might be true, but given the worsening relations between the US and Europe during the past few months, and the past week in particular, it just doesn’t seem like the best time to be going around calling attention to American arrogance and tone-deafness. Not that there is ever a really good time to do that, of course…

Best. Billboard. Ever.

Over the years there have been any number of stories, television skits, scenes from movies and so on about advertising media that would be truly interactive with the target market – print ads or electronic media that would carry the smell or texture of food products, ads through which you could touch or feel the product, and so on. There have been a number of attempts to produce such things in real life, although they have largely been on the primitive side – scented inserts in magazines selling fragrances, for example, or billboards promoting bakery companies that emit the smell of freshly-made cinnamon rolls. But the ultimate version of this concept would be an ad in which the target customer could actually sample the product – taste it, ingest it, or the equivalent. The infamous “television chocolate” from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one familiar example – a television commercial where it is possible for the viewer to reach into the screen and pull out an (edible) bar of chocolate…

Needless to say, in real life there would probably be several more immediate applications for a device that can send physical matter over television transmissions, and even the fantasy writers have been unable to explain how you could input one chocolate bar into your transmitter and allow thousands or millions of viewers to draw it out of their personal set. So despite the incredible impact this concept would have on potential customers, it has remained in the realm of fantasy, or at best science fiction – until now…

According to a story posted online by the Daily Record (UK) Carlsberg Beer has set up a billboard near their brewery in London that features an actual beer tap. Anyone who want to sample the company’s product can simply walk up and pull themselves a glass of beer from the tap. It’s hard to say for sure, but it looks like they also have security personnel (or possible police officers) keeping an eye on the tap to make sure everyone stays orderly and no one tries just drinking directly from the tap until they pass out. Given that all of this is happening in England it isn’t at all surprising to see that a long and enthusiastic but extremely orderly line has formed to wait for the free drinks…

Now, I don’t imagine I have to explain why this stunt would never work in the US – or any other place with a definite restriction on drinking age. I can also see it being an issue in places where under-age drinking isn’t a major factor but drunken bad behavior (and riots) is. And in much of the world I would actually be less worried about people overdoing it when they drink from the tap than I would be about people showing up with gallon bottles, five-gallon drums or armloads of quart/liter bottles and trying to appropriate as much of the free beer for themselves as possible. But as advertising stunts go it’s amazing, and it makes me wonder if you could apply the same idea to other types of product…

What about a billboard that didn’t just make people walking by see and smell the product, but also made samples available to try? You could have garment ads that allowed people to feel the fabric, or ads for consumer goods that had working features you could actually try out – although I suppose that given the tendency in this country to use sex to sell literally everything, it would only be a matter of time before somebody tried to combine all of these elements and ended up with a billboard ad you couldn’t show on television without being hit by massive fines from the FCC…

Maybe it’s just as well that the concept has been limited to beer so far…

Blunder or Not?

Personally, I’ve never really seen the appeal of Twitter; I have enough trouble getting my thoughts down in 600+ word blog posts; there’s no way I’d be able to get anything I’d want to say into a single tweet. Consequently, I did not see the tweet issued by the Hostess company (presumably the new owners of Hostess) yesterday in honor of Opening Day for Major League Baseball. It’s a picture of a Hostess cupcake – a yellow cake with vanilla frosting version, instead of the better-known chocolate cake product, with red icing in curlicues on top – with the caption “TOUCHDOWN.” Seen from the top down, the red-on-white cupcake really does look remarkably like a baseball, or at least a cake made to look like a baseball. The problem, if problem it was, is that the term “touchdown” applies to a scoring play in American-Rules football, not baseball…

If you also do not twitter, you can see the image and read some of the tweets on the Business Insider page about the stunt. Apparently, when the supposedly “botched” advertising tweet launched, the sort of people who both follow commercial bakeries/snack food producers and comment on their advertising went berserk, sending thousands (or possibly millions) of derisive tweets into cyberspace to mock the company for not knowing football from baseball. The company responded with a second tweet, remarking on how excited they were at the return of “Sportsball,” which rather settled the matter as far as I was concerned: the term “Sportsball” is an Internet term which mocks real-world sports and people who spend more time watching professional athletics than running around in virtual communities online. I think we can conclusively say that the company knew what it was doing; the more subtle issue was whether or not this was a good idea…

It seems clear enough that Hostess is using this artificial “blunder” to draw attention to itself – in this case, from thousands of twitter users and anyone to whom they point out the original tweet. In a larger sense, though, what they are doing is trying to get the audience to look at the cupcakes, remember how good a Hostess cupcake tastes, and perhaps even associate the company and the product with the start of spring, the start of baseball season, or even with an amusing tweet, blunder or online event. Whether you remember the specific tweet and the “TOUCHDOWN” caption or not, the company will be closer to the front of your thoughts the next time you make a purchase decision that involves snack foods – or, at least, that’s the idea…

The problem with advertising of this type is that nobody, including the Industrial and Organizational psychologists who study it, knows exactly how it works. Sometimes called the “Sleeper Effect,” the concept is that some ideas grow in the amount of influence they have over someone’s perceptions instead of fading away as they forget about the source material. In this case, the idea would be that you remember Hostess snack cakes, and how much you like to eat them, while forgetting about a possibly artificial mistake they may have made on Twitter. When it works, it can have an impact all out of proportion to the size, importance or cost of the media that produced it. Most of the time, however, all you get are ads that offend people and don’t make any sense, while fading off of the public consciousness and having no long-term effect at all…

What makes this particular stunt so interesting is that it didn’t cost Hostess anything to do it, which means that if it fails they can always just try something else. Most ads of this type have involved more expensive media, which entails the risk of not making back more sales differential than you spent making the ad in the first place. But if everyone who makes or markets consumer goods figures out that they can use this method to cut through the clutter in current electronic media and get their ad into your mind despite the interfering “noise,” then it seems likely that ads of this type will become the norm, the world will fill up with new and more annoying “noise,” and whoever is making these tweets will have to find some other approach and start over…

Getting Paid

For some time now I’ve been speculating about the long-term viability of a business model based entirely on user-generated content. We’ve seen small-scale experiments with the concept, such as the Frito Lay Super Bowl ads that were made entirely by fans of the products and offered to the company for free, or the “Comments” sections now prevalent on almost all news and entertainment websites. It’s certainly an appealing idea: if the company can convince its customers to create advertising copy or just offer content that other users will want, free of charge, there will be no need to spend company funds on these activities. But there are a number of corresponding issues with this business model, not least of which is that you are asking members of the general public – and your actual customers – to work for no compensation except (possible) gratification…

I’ve said all along that it was only a matter of time before these unpaid content providers either stopped providing content or started demanding payment for it. Not the commenters so much – leaving smart-ass remarks or even outright trolling is still considered to be its own reward – and not the people for whom posting their writing is the entire point of the exercise, like the people writing fan fiction. But sooner or later the people who go out of their way to review things, writing lengthy analyses or even testing specific products or services for the express purpose of reviewing them, are going to figure out that they are effectively providing the content that would otherwise have to be done by employees for free. I learned this week of a test case on this exact topic being brought against everyone’s favorite review cite, Yelp...

This isn’t the first time that Yelp has come to the negative attention of the reading public, of course; there have been repeated complaints about the company extorting money from its customers in return for positive reviews, and just recently three executives of the company have been accused of $20 million in insider training by their own stockholders. As you can see in the linked story from Courthouse News Service, however, Yelp is now being sued by a group of former contributors who are claiming that since they do the exact same work that Yelp’s paid personnel do, they should be entitled to the same wages – retroactive to when they began posting reviews…

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I ever liked the Yelp model, or the company itself; my opinion of them started to plummet when I learned about the extortion cases and has been dropping every since. And I’m not claiming to know anything about employment law (or any other kind, really), so I can’t comment on whether the case has any merit or if the protesting contributors are wasting their money and some attorney’s time. But one does have to wonder if either the company or the reviewers who are suing them have really considered all of the implications of this situation…

On the company side, it seems obvious that since they are making all of their money by displaying content effectively given to them for free, sooner or later someone was going to ask to be paid for doing all of the work. It should also be obvious that Yelp can’t just ignore cases like this one. Unlike a regular e-commerce site like Amazon, Yelp can’t support itself by moving merchandise; their income is dependent on a steady supply of new reviews to drive their products and services. Without that stream of information the company has nothing to sell; thus, they can’t risk losing that entire population of reviewers. But if they start paying the reviewers, then anyone who goes onto their site and scribbles down a few notes can demand payment for his or her work – and probably will – regardless of whether the company ever makes a cent on those reviews.  

As for the users, if they do start getting paid by Yelp, they will completely lose their anonymity (the company has to have their information in order to pay them – and that information can be subpoenaed), and will thus be subject to legal action for any outright lies or even inaccuracies in their reviews. There will probably be other complications involved, as well, such as conflicts of interest, rules their primary employer might have about working additional (paying) jobs, loss of disabled or protected status, or even paying taxes on the income…

Personally, I think the lawsuit is a colossally bad idea for all parties involved, and I don’t believe that Yelp is going to be able to get this genie back in the bottle; even if this particular lawsuit is defeated I think they can probably expect a number of others just like it. They’re going to have to find some way to deal with the issue, before things get any further out of hand…

The Ethics of Standards

Here’s another hypothetical for you: Let’s suppose that you have gained a national or international reputation because of your success with whatever it is you do (doesn’t matter what) and you decide to cash in on that public image by creating something (doesn’t matter what) and putting your name on it. Let’s also suppose that after a while you get bored with the venture and sell it to some investors, but as part of the purchase price you agree to let them keep your name on the property, because without that brand identity it will be much harder to sell. Now let’s suppose that after a few years go by the new owners have let the venture (whatever it is) run down to the point where you are no longer willing to have your name on it; the property is now so low quality that you feel it will hurt your reputation to be associated with it. Do you have the right to demand that they take your name off of the property?

If you didn’t catch it on the news I should probably just tell you that this is more or less what happened to Donald Trump this past week. Although Mr. Trump no longer owns two of the Atlantic City casinos that bear his name (he sold 90% interest in each to an investment group), they are still called the Trump Plaza and the Trump Taj Mahal, and at least part of their brand identity is a holdover from the days when Trump was building the biggest, gaudiest and most expensive everything in the world and slapping his name on the front. Unfortunately, Mr. Trump and his advisors now believe that these two properties are not being properly maintained, and have now decayed to the point where he is no longer willing to have his name on them. He is therefore filing a lawsuit to force the current owner to change the names of these facilities…

Now, I would be the first to admit that it isn’t easy to feel sorry for Donald Trump, or for anyone who has enough money to buy a hotel/casino from him in the first place. But the story does raise a serious point, even for those of us who aren’t billionaire reality-television star real estate developers. Assuming that you have licensed someone to make use of your name, and by extension your reputation or public image, at what point do you have the right to demand that they either conform to a standard that you would find acceptable (at least) or else stop using it? Or, to look at it from the other side of the desk, if you have purchased the right to use someone’s name, likeness or reputation in order to help sell your product, how much responsibility do you have to maintain quality at a level that won’t damage the reputation to which you have purchased the rights?

We should probably also acknowledge that if someone had purchased a license to use a celebrity’s name or likeness and that celebrity began acting in an embarrassing or repugnant way, no one would question the business owner’s wanting to drop the celebrity association, and a lawsuit to recover whatever fees were paid would not be considered inappropriate (although it might or might not succeed). But does the business have a corresponding responsibility to the celebrity? Does our answer change if the celebrity is a more sympathetic figure than Donald Trump, or if it is clear that the shoddy product or service really is threatening his or her livelihood?

No one is going to argue that any business should not comply with the terms of the contract it signed, or that a celebrity who is being paid for the use of his or her good name shouldn’t insist on a clause in the contract guaranteeing them the right to rescind use of that name in the event the business is damaging it. But assuming that no material breach has occurred, and that the celebrity has no such escape clause, does the business have any ethical responsibility to comply with such a demand? For that matter, does the celebrity have an ethical responsibility to let the business get whatever benefit they can from the use of his or her endorsement, assuming they were paid for it in the first place?

It’s worth thinking about…

What Can I Say?

I’m not sure how much I can add to the stories you’ve already seen going around the Internet about the hotel in Upstate New York that is supposedly charging wedding parties a $500 fee for each negative review posted about their establishment on Yelp. If this story is true – and it has been repeated on a number of legitimate news channels, as well as being mocked on the Tonight Show (among others) and no one is suing yet – then it’s an incredibly bad move in terms of both customer service and public relations. The hotel is claiming that it was merely a joke, made in reference to a guest complaint from years ago, but anyone who has ever spent a day working in any customer contact position could have told them that you don’t even joke about such things. Especially now, when any stupid prank you make could end up being shared with literally everyone in the world who has access to a computer. But from where I’m sitting the real questions are what to do about a public relations crisis of this magnitude – and will any of it matter?

First of all, it seems clear that whoever is running the hotel needs help with his or her advertising and website design, and should probably consider investing in assistance from one of the small firms that consult on such matters. People are always reluctant to do this, and I’ve never been sure of why. What is wrong with seeking help from someone whose professional knowledge of a critical aspect of your business is greater than your own? In this case it does seem a bit like closing the barn after the horse has run off, but it’s still better than standing in the open doorway looking like an imbecile. At the very least, the hotel management could check over their files to see if any former guest has ever been hit with a “negative Yelp reviews” fee – or even threatened with one for real – and then provide an apology and a refund of the $500. They should probably also have some competent third party go over their website and make sure there’s nothing else on it that could set people off…

The bigger issue is that once a story like this goes viral it can be incredibly difficult to kill off. There has never been any truth to the Neiman-Marcus cookie story, for example; at the time this canard began making its way around the Internet the company didn’t even sell cookies. Yet this remains one of the more common urban legends online over a decade after Snopes.com (among others) completely debunked it. The hotel probably doesn’t have the funds to take out full-page ads in a major newspaper denying the story, and so far denials online and in social media don’t seem to be helping. Reaching out directly to every past customer they can find and apologizing to anyone they actually charged for the negative reviews might help; explaining it was a joke and promising that they would never really do any such thing might help if they didn’t actually charge anyone. But their best bet is probably a mixture of competence and time…

The other side effect of the Internet age is a very low attention span – and a very short news cycle. By this time next week some other outrageous thing will probably have happened, and everyone in cyberspace will be off mocking someone else. If the hotel takes down anything online that could be considered rude, weird, or unfriendly, refunds any charges they have to, and makes a point of taking care of all future guests – whether they gave good reviews on Yelp or not – they might be able to live through the firestorm and rebuild their brand and their client base the old-fashioned way: one relationship at a time…

Unless they really are trying to cover up for substandard service by trying to suppress any bad reviews…

Bad at Math

In the past I have noted in the space that mathematics was never my strong subject, which turned out to be less of a problem than you would probably expect given the amount of quantitative analysis commonly found in Management research. For most of my career I have gotten around this by using analysis methods that can be done using programs like Minitab and Access, and sometimes in Excel using the Solver function or just running pivot tables. I’ve also made extensive use of one of my favorite management principles: “Never be afraid to ask for help.” But in the long run the ability to do simple arithmetic in my head has taken me further than any of my long-suffering math teachers could (reasonably enough) have imagined. For example, I understand why a distilling company that has been in business for less than one year is probably lying about their five-year-old product…

You can pick up the Daily Beast story if you want the names of some of the companies involved in the scandal, but the basic concept is that for the past few years there have been a large number of small companies entering the distilled spirits market with what they claim are “craft distilled” products – allegedly hand-made and hand-bottled in small batches using an artisanal process that is somehow superior to that used by companies that have been producing quality product for over a century. However, if you read the fine print (and look up said company’s incorporation documents) you will find that some of the people claiming to have distilled and aged their own products are actually using beverages distilled by a large-scale factory operation in Indiana and then sold in bulk…

Now, it’s important to remember that none of these things are illegal as such, assuming the company is using all of the right disclaimers. Saying that a given bottle contains liquor aged five years when the contents were distilled last week is a crime, but saying that we age our product for five years isn’t – the company may indeed be in the middle of its first five-year run of product and could just be selling liquor that someone else aged for five years until that first run is ready. If all of these facts are clearly specified on the package then the company hasn’t actually violated any of the food labeling laws. Whether or not they have violated the truth in advertising laws is another matter, of course, and even if these business practices do ultimately turn out to be permissible under the law, the ethics of the situation are another matter entirely…

I have also pointed out from time to time over the years that if the government ever outlaws making money off of the stupid, the credulous, and people who are bad at mathematics our economy will probably collapse. Without product labelling and truth in advertising laws there would be nothing to stop companies from marketing liquids distilled from any available organic sludge as genuine imported liquor from whatever country is selling best this week, just to take the obvious example, and most of these laws do include the making of misleading statements on the list of things you are not allowed to do. But anyone who publically states that their company was founded in 2013 and their products for sale are five years old is effectively telling you up front that someone else made that product…

You’ll have to decide for yourself if the product is worth the asking price – and whether or not you are comfortable doing business with a company that is following the letter rather than the spirit of the consumer protection laws. There could be other problems that would result from such a practice…

You Had Better Duck

Some time ago in this space I wrote about the adventures of a 60-foot yellow rubber duck that had exploded in a harbor in Taiwan, which I used as an example of unexpected operational failures and the need to stay at least one move ahead of whatever else is going on. At the times this may have seemed a bit harsh, given that rubber ducks do not usually explode, and that if you are in the middle of displaying an 18-meter tall inflatable sculpture half a world away from your home base (the duck’s creator is from The Netherlands) there are probably a great many things on your checklist that come before “Make Sure Duck Does Not Explode.” For example, making sure that the duck does not get loose from its moorings and float away down a river, never to be seen again…

You can pick up the story from the BBC News site if this is getting too fantastical for you, and I certainly wouldn’t blame you if you did. Apparently, after exploding (or bursting, at least) in Taiwan and deflating in Hong Kong, the duck had been taken to a port on the Nanming River where it was mounted on a 10-ton metal platform and anchored to the riverbed using steel cables – none of which appears to have slowed it down when flood waters hit the installation and sent the duck drifting away. Despite the fact that the duck weighs over a ton, is as tall as a five-storey building, and is bright yellow (like the bath toy it resembles) there have been no reported sightings of it confirmed at this time…

Now, I will be the first to admit that I don’t know anything about public art installations, meteorology, river currents, large-scale rubber fabrication or the relative tensile strength of steel anchor cables. But I do know a few things about preventable failure, and I must admit that if a project I was running had already exploded, deflated, been attacked by eagles (as reported here), and was a larger-scale version of an installation that had already gotten loose from its moorings once in Europe (although that time the duck was caught again – when it became wedged against a large bridge, effectively blocking travel on both the roadway on the bridge and the canal below) I might consider asking how certain everyone was that this particular installation was safe…

Fortunately for all parties involved the duck isn’t really part of a business venture; its International tour (which has already passed through Sydney, Sao Paulo and Baku without incident) is intended mainly to bridge cultural barriers and increase understanding between nations by exposing them to something so completely absurd and yet aesthetically adorable that anyone whose sense of wonder hasn’t been surgically removed must stand in amazement and/or swear off of whatever they were drinking the night before. But advertising stunts using smaller inflatable constructs are becoming increasingly common in some countries (including the US), and the duck’s misadventures give an excellent example of just how far an otherwise harmless publicity stunt could potentially go off the rails – or, in this case, down the river…

It has often been noted that while all human beings learn from mistakes, the truly successful person is usually the one who learns from someone else’s mistakes. I certainly hope this is true – especially if any of my readers (assuming I have readers) is planning anything that involves large-scale public installations, river conditions, or inflatable waterfowl…

Still Not Sure

I have written in this space before about those occasions when it seems impossible to tell whether a given company is actually taking the actions you’ve just read about, or if they are only doing something outrageous in the hopes of attracting media attention. A lot of new product promotions work that way, partly because it is difficult to create a truly ingenious advertisement for even the most superlative product, but also because it is becoming increasingly difficult to cut though the massive amounts of clutter clogging up any potential medium. In addition, there are a far greater number of both media and channels within them appearing every year – reaching all American television viewers was relatively easy when there were only three or four channels being broadcast, for example, but doing so is much harder when many areas have 900 or more possible viewing choices. And that does not even consider the increasing number of people who get all of their news and entertainment online, and don’t ever watch television…

It’s probably also worth pointing out that not all demographics will consider the same things outrageous or shocking, for that matter. Business failures resulting from efforts to market a new product or service to the wrong audience are legion, and it’s impossible to say how many additional ventures have failed because whoever was making the strategic policy decided to pass on a world-beating product simply because he or she didn’t like the idea – there’s no wreckage lying around from ventures somebody didn’t try, you see. Failures of this type are referred to collectively as the “I am the world” fallacy by Scott Adams in one of his non-fiction books about management, and can occur any time a senior manager applies his or her own preferences to a business decision instead of consulting actual marketing data. It is imperative that all managers and business analysts question their assumptions, not just regularly but constantly, before taking action. This is why I held back my first impression of the new Doritos product and took another look…

If you haven’t heard about them yet, the story goes that PepsiCo Canada has just released a new product that they are calling Doritos “Roulette”flavor. Hype aside, these are bags of ordinary nacho cheese corn chips, only every seventh or eighth chip is as spicy as the company has been able to make it, turning each bite into something of an adventure. The idea appears to be that if two (or more) customers take turns pulling a single chip out at random and eating it, sooner or later one of them is going to draw (and eat) one that will be painfully spicy. None of the materials I have seen about this product to date address what the players are supposed to do with the rest of the bag at that point – or why anyone would purchase these chips if they were not intending to play the implied game…

Now, we should acknowledge that this is hardly the first product to play on the apocryphal game of “Russian Roulette” in a food product, let alone the only food product with potential inedible portions hidden in each package. A familiar example in recent years might be the “Every-flavor Beans” created as a tie-in to the Harry Potter books and movies (their fictional counterparts appear in the story), which included such unappetizing flavors as grass, dirt, earthworm and vomit and oddball flavors like toast, popcorn, black pepper and sausage with more conventional candy flavors. Fans of the series would challenge each other to select a bean at random and eat it despite the possibly revolting taste, much as Doritos is suggesting their customers do with the corn chips. Whether or not you could just spit the losing beans out again was a matter of individual preference…

My personal reaction to the Doritos Roulette flavor was to question why the company is bothering to produce them – the Doritos “Flaming Hot” flavor has never been that successful, and the “losing” chips in this product are much hotter and even less appealing. But it important to note that I have now passed out of the key demographic for corn chips (males, 18-36 years old), and I’ve been out of the food wholesale business for over a decade; the fact that this product does not appeal to me is based on behavior patterns and consumer preferences that may well be irrelevant to the target market, rather than any hard data. I’m not sure whether this product has any real potential, or if it will have a brief flare of notoriety and then vanish onto the compost heap of history. I’m just calling it to your attention because that personal gut reaction should not be used to make decisions for a multinational corporation, but reactions just like it often are – and sometimes they destroy entire companies, not just unusual product ideas…

I’ve Seen This Before…

I wasn’t really planning on an update to my last post, or anything else about the ongoing burger wars, but over the weekend I kept seeing the new Taco Bell ad (the one with a bunch of guys who are actually named Ronald McDonald eating the new Taco Bell breakfast products) in heavy rotation, and I could not shake the feeling that I had seen this somewhere before. Of course, I am getting older, and given my ongoing memory problems there are going to be times when a sensation of déjà vu is unavoidable. But then I saw an article on the AdWeek site which points out that this has, in fact, been done before…

You can pick up the original article here, if you want to, but the details are simple enough. About 12 years ago, one of the other quick-serve hamburger chains called Jack-in-the-Box pulled exactly the same stunt, finding a guy whose legal name was Ronald MacDonald and getting him to eat and express appreciation for their new burger product on camera. The Jack-in-the-Box people apparently selected a guy who uses the alternate spelling of MacDonald on purpose, just in case their larger competitor decided to give them grief about the campaign, but their ad agency admits that they also chose that particular Ronald because he performed well on the video. Other than that, though, the commercial uses almost exactly the same gimmick in almost exactly the same way…

Whether or not this will have any effect on the ad campaign – or on sales of the new products it is trying to promote – remains to be seen, of course. As of this writing the Jack-in-the-Box chain is only operating in 19 of the states, and with only 2,200 locations it’s still relatively small when compared to Taco Bell’s 6,500 locations, let alone McDonald’s. People in many parts of the country may never have seen a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant (the Company’s website lists the nearest one to East Lansing as being 210 miles away in Indiana), or even seen one of its ads. And even if they have, people don’t necessarily devote that much time to memorizing ads run by (relatively) small fast-food chains a decade or more ago. There’s also the issue that Taco Bell itself has a history of running with unconventional advertising…

Probably the best-remembered Taco Bell campaign is the Talking Chihuahua series of the late 1990s, although the late 1980s “Make a Run for the Border” campaign is still widely satirized. My personal favorite will always be the company’s stunt in 2001 when the Mir space station was falling out of orbit, and the company put up a 40’ by 40’ target in the South Pacific and broadcast that if any part of the falling station hit the target they would give a free taco to every person in America. With a history like that it’s hard to imagine that anyone would get that worked up about this new Ronald McDonald campaign, even if it is ripping off an earlier commercial made by a rival company. A much bigger issue is how McDonald’s will respond to the Company’s new breakfast products…

As I noted in my last post, the off-peak sales have been a key factor in making the McDonald’s locations more profitable than any of their competitors, and while it will take time for any new product to gain traction, let alone non-traditional offerings like a taco made out of a waffle, it seems highly likely that they will have to do something in reply to this new challenge. There is no question that McDonald’s represents an entrenched competitor with an established customer base and a large network of locations already optimized to sell breakfast products during the relevant business hours; the question is whether that will be enough to carry the day. Or, more to the point, perhaps, how will they respond to the challenge? Because if the history of the Burger Wars has taught us anything, it’s that McDonald’s is unlikely to just sit still for this…

Making Things Harder

I’ve been on record several times in this space saying that I believe that food service is the hardest industry there is, and nothing I’ve seen recently has changed my mind about that. Between issues that are completely out of your control (cost of ingredients, local ordinances, traffic conditions on nearby roads), unreasonable demands and entitlement from customers, outright fraud and the fact that people who have no knowledge of the industry will assume that what you must be easy, food service is almost a perfect storm of all of the things that are problematic in the retail, grocery, entertainment, health, child care, nutrition and personal service sectors. Trying to cut through the noise in this industry and actually get your advertising noticed by potential customers is even worse, frankly, and leads to lapses of taste and judgment like the “Freaky King” and food-as-sex fiascos I’ve already referenced. And all of that is assuming that you don’t specifically make things harder on yourself…

Consider for example the recent advertising series from the Red Robin hamburger chain, as referenced on the Yahoo News site this week. For those unfamiliar with the company, Red Robin’s menu is built around hamburgers, and specifically around 24 specialty types that include teriyaki sauce and pineapple, or bleu cheese dressing, or what have you. Some of these are kid-friendly, but the majority are targeted at young adults who have moved beyond fast food offerings but not past enjoying hamburgers – e.g. the coveted 18-35 demographic. Since any restaurant that is perceived (correctly or not) as a hamburger joint will have trouble drawing customers who don’t eat meat – or even getting parties that include a vegetarian member – the company has offered vegetarian and vegan versions of all of the burgers for years. What is baffling is why they should have chosen to make fun of those options…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that vegetarians are not part of the key demographic for a company that has positioned itself as a hamburger restaurant. I don’t know how much sales volume the company has in vegetarian dishes, but it clearly is not the focus of their operations. We should also note that the use of snarky, “edgy,” and somewhat mocking styles of advertisement have become popular across a wide range of companies and industries in recent years. But by the same token it does not require any great, in-depth knowledge of the issue to realize that many people in that community take the vegetarian lifestyle very seriously, and do not react well to anything they consider mocking or disparaging of their choices – anymore than any other distinct group likes being made fun of by an organization that is allegedly soliciting their business…

In its efforts to appeal to both young adults and families, the company has long cultivated a humorous and somewhat irreverent image; in theory this serves to help differentiate them from rival chains that make use of more conventional branding (and advertising) strategies. And they can with some justice claim not to have been mocking vegetarians in general in this ad, but rather gently poking fun at the sort of teenage drama that results in a single member of a family suddenly going vegetarian and then insisting on everyone else in the household conforming to his (or in this case, her) decisions. But given how common militant vegetarians are in our culture – and how vocal they are known to be about anything that appears to disparage them – it’s hard to imagine how any marketing advantage could be gained through these ads that would offset the resulting difficult they would create…

Should Have Known Better

By now you have probably caught at least some of the news reports about the Abercrombie situation - the video interview where their CEO basically told everyone who doesn't look like a fashion model that he does not want their business or even their unsightly presence in his stores. It's not clear from the interview how much of this was a publicity stunt - along the "any exposure is good exposure" lines - and how much of it was a considered articulation of the company's policy and mission, but whatever effect the CEO was going for he doesn't appear to have gotten it...

An article off the Brand Index web site indicates that ever since the interview went viral the popularity of the Abercrombie & Fitch brand with consumers in the coveted 18-34 demographic has been plummeting – based largely on the buying preferences of the Millennial generation, who don’t appear to have taken the whole thing well. Whether or not this die-off in the brand’s popularity includes the “beautiful people” who were the original target of the Abercrombie advertising remains to be seen, but even if the loss in sales and corresponding loss of revenue are the result of people who do not fit that image becoming offended and taking their business elsewhere, this seems like an unusually stupid example of management arrogance…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that Abercrombie is hardly the first company, even within the fashion industry, to attempt to create an image of exclusivity around its product line. In general, the idea that a product is intended not just for anyone, but specifically for your demographic group is appealing to a large percentage of consumers, and since clothing can be said to have specific age, body type, activity and financial restrictions on appropriate consumption, it lends itself very well to such a marketing strategy. By the same token, only an idiot would go around telling potential customers that their money is not welcome, and that they should take their business somewhere else. Especially considering that this is not the first such gaff committed in recent years…

Consider, for example, the infamous case of Gerald Ratner, who was once CEO of the family’s chain of jewelry stores – until one day in 1991 when someone asked him how his company managed to sell a specific product for such an absurdly low price. Ratner replied “Because it’s total crap” – apparently failing to understand that, like several other industries we have discussed in this space, jewelry stores make sales based on image, salesmanship, and occasionally craftsmanship, rather than the absolute value of the goods being sold. As a result, his company’s stock lost somewhere on the order of $1 billion USD in value in less than a week, Ratner was forced out of the CEO’s position in a business his family had owned for three generations, the company became such a laughingstock that they had to change the name of their corporation and re-brand all of their stores, and to this day a major act of management idiocy is still called “Doing a Ratner” in the United Kingdom…

Will this kind of mistake come to be known as “Doing an Abercrombie” in the U.S.? Or perhaps, “Doing a Jeffries” in honor of the CEO himself? Will the company survive, or will it finally lose the gut-fight it was in with American Eagle and H&M and disappear from the scene? Will Abercrombie’s ownership group demand action, possibly including Jeffries’ resignation and a complete spin control/brand recovery effort? It’s really too early to say what the final outcome will be, but I think we are justified in saying that the CEO at Abercrombie and Fitch really should have known better…

Mixed Messages

I was reflecting on whether or not to write a Valentine’s Day post again this year (is it a tradition, because I’ve done them so often before, or just a recycling of old material?) when I saw an ad for KY products that attempted to address the time-honored question of just what does one get a male significant other for Valentine’s Day in the first place. As you might expect, the company was advising the viewer that what her significant other wants most would be sex, preferably with the assistance of one of the many fine KY brand personal lubricants. Clearly it’s a tongue-in-cheek ad, intended to be funny and just sexy enough to cut through the clutter of incessant television advertising. But watching it, I couldn’t help but feel that there were several problems with this approach…

First of all, the company is perpetuating the old stereotype of men being obsessed with having more sex, along with the implication that women are almost equally dedicated to have as little sex as possible. As always, I will leave moral and philosophical discussions about whether such stereotypes are sexist, elitist or generally detrimental to our society to those better qualified to have such discussions, and simply point out that this is a problematic message for a company that specializes in selling products that facilitate sex to be promoting. Just like any other company, KY needs to convince as many people to make use of its products as it possibly can, not just on February 14, but at all times, and reinforcing the popular belief that half of the population should want to avoid the primary activity in which your product is used does not seem like a strategically sound choice…

Even worse, though, is the possibility that the other half of the population might take the same message to heart. If male customers accept that what their significant other wants most is to avoid having sex with them, it would logically follow that they should offer her a night (or a selection of nights) without any demands (or even requests) of a sexual nature. One could easily imagine a variation on those novelty “coupon books” that offer coupons good for various sexual activities, only in this case they excuse the woman presenting them from such activities at her discretion. At which point, KY is not only missing out on opportunities to sell its products, but also eliminating any chance that their male customers might buy something on the vague or distant hope of using it…

Personally, I’ve always found the stereotype to be annoying, if not outright insulting, because of the remarkably low opinion of all human beings it of necessity perpetuates. Not all men are monomaniacal perverts spending all of their time focused on sex, or such miserable partners that no same woman would ever want them – and, by the same token, not all women are frigid, conniving manipulators who exploit that weakness in their counterparts in order to get what they want by participating in an activity in which they derive no enjoyment whatsoever. In fact, I would argue that neither of these things are inherently correct, and that most of the people who conform to these behavior patterns are doing so because they have been socialized into doing so by elements of the popular/media culture in which they live…

Now, I’m not claiming to have any better answers for KY, let alone for human civilization in general. None of my degrees are in marketing or advertising, let alone psychology, sociology or anthropology. I’m just saying that perpetuating behavioral stereotypes that influence people to avoid using your product may not be the best way of selling it…

The Ethics of Obfuscation

There was a lot of reaction a few weeks ago when a company that makes razor blades came out with information about how long its products last in use – for the first time in history. For most of the time safety razors have existed manufacturers have avoided saying anything about how many times you could use one before it became too dull or otherwise failed to function, and there was no motivation for them to do so. If the company listed a number that was too high not only would they lower the number of blades purchased (and their sales figures), but they also ran the very real chance of being sued by somebody who was “injured” trying to use a product too many times. But if they listed a number that was too low they were damaging the image of their product (you only get HOW MANY uses out of each one? What a piece of junk!) as well as raising the effective cost to the consumer by limiting how many shaves you get for your dollar. All things considered, it just made more sense not to comment and let people find out for themselves…

In recent years, however, the cost of razor blades has risen to the point where this strategy is no longer entirely effective. People may not care whether a $1 product gives them five uses as opposed to four – it’s a five-cent difference per use, and one dollar a week is a mostly trivial amount anyway. But when that amount rises to $4 per cartridge we are now talking a dollar per use, or potentially $365 per year, and those disposable razors that cost fifty cents each are starting to look a lot more attractive – even if they turn out to be single-use items, you’re still saving 50% each day. If the company wants to continue charging that amount per unit, they need to introduce some form of additional value to the customer, and since they are already claiming to provide a superior product (e.g. a more comfortable and effective shave) they can’t just claim the product is worth the extra money and hope for the best…

With the introduction of a television spot claiming that its top-of-the-line razors can last up to five weeks, Gillette has finally crossed over that line – although we should note that the ad does say “up to” five weeks, and does not discuss whether the spokesman (seen traveling around the world during the commercial) actually used it every day for five weeks or just when the cameras were rolling. The question that came to my mind wasn’t so much whether these claims were too vague to challenge (they are) but whether this sort of obfuscation was ethical in the first place? Or is it an unavoidable side-effect of offering products in this category in the first place?

In general, there is no way for the manufacturer to gauge how many uses a given customer will get from one shaving cartridge. Beard hairs vary in thickness and hardness, and users who shave their whole face will get fewer uses from those who wear a goatee, or from those who just use the razor to keep their neck clean. This time frame becomes even more ambiguous for those customers who also shave their legs or backs, or who have a significant other who borrows their razor to do so. And even if all hair was identical, and all users had the same amount of it to manage, the question of what constitutes too dull to shave with is a matter of taste, and different customers will put up with different amounts of discomfort and/or razor burn. It might be possible for the manufacturer to recommend guidelines, or for the industry to establish standards for comparison, but none of the companies involved have any motivation for doing so – and the real question is more general anyway…

Does any company offering a consumer product for sale have an ethical responsibility to inform its customers how many uses they can expect to get before the product requires replacement? Granted that this is not always possible – and even when it is, a precise figure may not be realistic – does the manufacturer have any obligation to provide performance and/or life cycle information to the consumer? Does our answer change if the company has in-house test data that provides a reasonable estimate of the product’s durability? Or does a free market require us to allow any company to market whatever safe and effective products it wants to, and let the consumer draw his or her own conclusions about product life and relative value?

It’s worth thinking about…

Failure to Communicate

From time to time I’ll be wandering around on the Internet and run across a controversial issue where neither of the factions appears to be communicating with the other one. It’s very common to discover that the different sides of a polarizing issue aren’t listening to each other; if they could reach agreement there wouldn’t be a controversy in the first place, and humans are notorious for trying to shout down the other side rather than listen to them – and for refusing to listen to anyone who is so obviously wrong-headed that they would take the other side of this argument in the first place. But sometimes you encounter a situation where the two sides think they are arguing with each other but really aren’t – because their arguments aren’t actually connected. If one side is arguing that broccoli is better in soup than in a salad, and the other side is arguing that domestic broccoli should be subsidized in order to produce a favorable trade balance with broccoli-producing nations not party to the NAFTA agreements, the two sides aren’t actually fighting, no matter how much they think they are. A similar case exists, so far as I can tell, in the recent EpiPen advertising fracas…

You can pick up the story here if you want to, but the basic idea is that a company was advertising its pediatric version of the self-contained epinephrine injector known as an “EpiPen” in a happy, bouncy sort of television commercial with a spokesperson playing the role of the mother of a child with food allergies and gushing about how grand it is that her son can go to his friend’s birthday party and eat the cake, because if there’s something in it that might cause a severe reaction she can just use their EpiPen. This is, of course, nonsense; epinephrine injections are indeed used to keep the patient alive in the case of a severe reaction, but the first (and most important) line of defense is awareness – not allowing a child with a severe food allergy to come into contact with that food in the first place. Parents with such children saw the television ad and went ballistic, comparing it (correctly, I believe) to advocating unprotected sex because treatments for some STDs exist. The manufacturer listened to the objections, pulled the ads, and that should have been the end of the matter…

If you read any of the stories about these events online, or on any of the larger news-aggregation sites, you will see dozens of comments supporting the company’s use of the ad and disparaging the parents for complaining. Most of these posts accuse the parents in question of being afraid of being seen as bad parents; the logic seems to be that since EpiPen products are potential lifesavers, parents who are objecting to the ads must be embarrassed about having to be told about such things in a television ad, and would rather not purchase the EpiPen (or let anyone else know to do so) than admit their limited knowledge. It’s a silly idea to begin with, and it completely ignores the fact that none of the parents or advocacy groups protesting the original ad have ever complained about the company advertising its products – they’re objecting to the suicidally/homicidally stupid assumption that just because you have an EpiPen you (or your child) can swan around doing just as you please. It’s also worth noting that none of the people taking this position seems aware of just how stupid the behavior advocated in the television ad was – or just how infuriatingly condescending it is of them to assume that the parents in question didn’t find out about epinephrine injectors the moment their child was diagnosed with a life-threatening allergy…

From a business standpoint, it’s probably worth noting that if you’re going to create television advertising for a prescription that has lifestyle implications, it might be worthwhile to ask your customers how they use your product and how it affects their lifestyle in the first place. And as a blogger and citizen in good standing of the World Wide Web, I can only suggest to the parents and parent-advocates in this story: Don’t Feed the Trolls!

Just When You Thought It Was Safe…

It has been a couple of weeks now, and you’d probably thought (as I did) that the Belvidere Vodka scandal had passed out of the news story. True, the original ad was crass, tasteless, and possibly a trigger for PTSD episodes in certain people, but the company pulled the ad, posted a formal apology written by their CEO, made a donation to the country’s largest anti-sexual violence organization (RAINN), and probably fired a few people (for creating the scandal, if not necessarily for their idiocy in creating the ad in the first place). Short of having the sense not to do such things in the first place, you’d have to day that Belvidere had handled the situation as well as you could expect, and everyone should probably just get on with whatever they were doing. Except that now it turns out the company may have used the original picture without the permission of the owners, including the woman in the picture…

You can pick up the original story on the Superstation KTLA Los Angeles web page, but it seems that the woman pictured in the original ad (who appears to be fighting off an attacker) owns the rights to that picture and the company never asked for permission to use it; they just ripped the image down off the Internet and used it however they wanted to. The image is taken from a comic on-line video put out by her production company, and didn’t originally have anything to do with vodka, date rape, or controversy, but in future no one is likely to see it as anything else. Even worse, the owner has gone from a well-regarded (if slightly obscure) working professional to the person at the center of the scandal; the negative reactions from people who believe she was hired by Belvidere to make this image especially for the occasion should more than negate any benefit to be gained as the victim in the famous image. Naturally, she’s suing the company…

Now, I don’t have anything deep or profound to say about this new fracas; Belvidere should definitely have known better than to go stealing images from off of the Internet, and could almost certainly have afforded to hire their own actors and stage their own picture instead. Even a very expensive photo shoot probably would not have cost as much as this lawsuit is going to, and the fact that while the company (and its CEO) were busy apologizing to the world at large they neglected to say anything to the person whose property they store and whose life (and potentially career) they have ruined is just going to make things worse if the case goes to court…

I call this to your attention because this whole episode can be summed up in a single word: professionalism. As in, Belvidere displayed absolutely no professionalism during the conception, development, launch or damage control for this whole stunt. Any working professional (in any creative field) knows that images are intellectual property, and unless you have access to the copyright you do not have the right to use them. Any working professional (in any creative, communications, linguistics or academic field) knows that humor is not universal, and things that you believe represent edgy, wacky comedy may be viewed as intentional infliction of mental anguish by someone else. And any working professional (in any business field) knows that treating any company activity with the care that an eight-year-old might use for a school project is simply asking for trouble, usually in the form of lost sales, damaged reputation, expensive litigation, and occasionally protesters burning you in effigy in the streets…

Don’t let this happen to your business…