Improper Content Alienates Your Customers: Lessons from Failed
Social Media Marketing Campaigns
Su Tong (1155082126)
Every marketer dreams of conducting a successful social
media campaign with the innovative and unique marketing content that precisely resonates
their target customers, in order to hit the goals like boosting brand awareness
or increasing sales. However, there are always chances when the content strategy
makes some mistakes and the result can be reversely disastrous that will
alienate your loyal customers. How are those failed social media campaigns
like? What common characteristics do they have, and how can we avoid them?
Reviewing several previous failures in 2016 may help us learn better.
A Person’s Death[i]
As the legendary rock singer and musician David Bowie had
died in January 2016, his name became a hit on social media. While people were sharing
the grief of his passing away, a number of brands made use of the trend and
embed the marketing information into the postings. Apple’s vice president Philip
Schiller was one of them, who posted a brief tribute plus a link to the
shopping page of David Bowie’s works on iTunes.
The tweet obviously annoyed
some followers with some comments blaming him on touting products with people’s
death. It would be better not to involve people’s death in the social media
campaign, because which would indicate the lack of respect to the dead person and
undermine the brand recognition.
The tragedy
Similarly, another failure is caused by making use of a tragedy,
in the campaign of Miracle Mattress, a mattress manufacturer in the United
States. In order to promote their latest product “twin towers”, the official
account of Miracle Mattress on Facebook posted a video before the 15th
anniversary of the 911 terrorist attack, in which the cast encouraged audiences
to “remember the 911” and get any size mattress for a twin price. They even
fell backward into two stacks of mattresses in the symbol of the two towers of
the World Trade Center.
The video was soon removed from the Facebook page
because of the outrage of viewers, and the company later posted an apology
letter. Up to date, the search predictive words for Miracle Mattress on Google
is “Miracle Mattress 9/11”, which demonstrates the disastrous consequence this
campaign brought to the brand.
The political controversy[ii]
At the beginning of 2016, Coca cola proposed a campaign on
social media with a snowy map of Russia, to express their new year’s message,
which eventually upset audiences in both Russia and Ukraine. The map was firstly
condemned by Russian social media users that it didn’t include Crimea region which
had been annexed by Russia from Ukraine since the end of 2014.
Under the great
pressure, Coca Cola made changes to the map to include Crimea and other
politically sensitive regions, which triggered another firestorm in Ukraine, where
the demand of boycott Coca Cola got heated. The initial goal was to convey a
greeting to audiences but ended up with a controversy over the political issue
and bad impression of the brand. Any involvement in politics-relevant issues
should be carefully taken care of, while a general suggestion for social media
marketing strategy is to stay away from stirring different political voices.
The value proposition[iii]
An American accessories and handbag brand Vera Bradley launched
the “It’s good to be a girl” campaign in September 2016 both offline and on
social media, which instead of being liked by feminism people, ended up being
labelled as “sexism”. As part of the campaign, several answers were promoted to
describe how good to be a girl in the society, which are, unfortunately, mostly
viewed as stereotyped ones and upset its audiences.
Such as “being able to hang
out with the boys but still be treated like a lady,” or “because there are so
many ways to accessorize your wardrobe.” A campaign that was designed to
celebrate the independent woman image eventually missed the shared value with
its target customers.
The core of social media marketing campaign is to build
connections with the audiences on the online community, which means that marketers
have to learn the target customers better in terms of their daily lives, topic
preference, personality and value proposition, utilize proper content to
actually gain their empathy.
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