The Motrin Mess
Beware the ticked-off mommy blogger.
If anyone actually still doubts the power of moms in general – or the mom blogger in particular – last weekend’s gale-force storm over a Motrin ad is the perfect example of how this online community can:
a) (to extend the weather analogy) leave marketers feeling thunderstruck, and
b) dramatically impact how businesses communicate with moms.
A summary: When McNeil Consumer Healthcare, maker of pain reliever Motrin (and a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson), posted an ad on the Motrin website about “baby wearing” — carrying a child in a baby carrier, such as a sling or a wrap – a number of moms reacted negatively to the ad. The ad’s intent was to encourage moms to use Motrin to alleviate the sore muscles that could result from wearing a child all day. Moms, however, were offended by the ad’s implication that they wear their babies to be “fashionable” and by the voiceover saying that “in theory” carrying your baby around in this way is a good idea and that “supposedly” it’s a real bonding experience.
The moms blogged and twittered their thoughts, which of course were read by other moms, many of whom also reacted negatively to the ad. They published THEIR comments. To quote The New York Times’ Lisa Belkin, who summed it all up well in her Motherlode blog:
“By Saturday evening (the ad was) the most tweeted subject on Twitter. By Sunday there was a nine minute video on YouTube, to the tune of Danny Boy, showing screen shots of the outraged twitter posts interspersed with photos of Moms carrying babies in slings.
Bloggers began calling for boycotts. Bloggers asked their readers to alert the mainstream press. A few voices chimed in to say they didn’t find the ad to be that big a deal. There are a few more examples here and here.)
By Sunday afternoon a few bloggers and tweeters had gotten the ad agency that created the ad on the phone, to find they didn’t know a lot about Twitter and didn’t seem to have a clue that there was so much anger piling up online.”
Belkin goes on to identify mom bloggers—correctly — as “one of the most vocal, quickest-to-blog, ‘strongest-to-band-together-and-form-one-opinion-like-the-Borg’ collectives out there.”
The resolution: McNeil pulled the ad from its Web site, and their vp of marketing publicly apologized to the mom bloggers, both on the Motrin site and via direct emails—a response, we feel, that was appropriate.
Blogging is all about conversation, and sometimes conversation escalates to confrontation – a whisper becomes a shout. The lesson here: Companies need to listen, as soon as mom bloggers begin to speak. In this online world, even the smallest delay in response can make a difference. The Motrin controversy began on a weekend. By Monday, the ad was pulled from the site—for the speed of that response, McNeil should be commended.
Of course, the whole experience raises this question: Where should the line be drawn? At what point must a company react in a major way to criticism, vs. simply accepting that not everyone is going to like everything it does? How many moms felt the ad was innocuous, but didn’t publicly argue on behalf of Big Pharma? And how many – could it be? — identified with sore muscles from wearing their babies? Were moms who opposed the ad truly greater in number (as it certainly seemed) – or simply more vocal?
Some observers suggested that McNeil should have run the ad past moms themselves before it was launched. That goes without saying. But we don’t know what kind of mom testing McNeil did or did not do before introducing the ad. Not all moms or even mom bloggers will react the same way to a product concept, ad copy or the messaging in a PR campaign—even with the up-front input of one group of moms, fiascos can still occur.
All that having been said – here’s to the moms who made their voices known, and to the marketer who paid attention. More power to you both. And may all marketers keep the Motrin experience in mind – and a very large bottle of same in hand — so they don’t have their own headache in the future.
