Some Fun Marketing Tidbits
I have some time to write today, so thought I’d post this round-up of marketing tidbits I’ve been collecting.
First, I’ve really been enjoying all the tax-filing deadline food deals today (April 15). Bought two foot-long Subway sandwiches for the price of one this afternoon in what a local Subway outlet was calling the Subway Stimulus plan, for example. Another I read about that sounded appealing – seafood specialist McCormick & Schmick’s offering a $10.40 menu. My years of writing about public relations have left me with an appreciation of fun PR stunts.
Speaking of which, how did you feel about all the attention KFC received for offering to pave potholes and put its logo on the repaired streetscapes? We’ve been having a spirited debate here in the Marketing News newsroom about its effectiveness as a marketing tool. Is anyone going to buy KFC products because they saw the name on a street? Seems doubtful. On the other hand, the media ate the story up (sorry, couldn’t resist) and that has to have planted the urge in some people’s minds to eat some chicken.
Is all publicity good publicity?
That must be what Domino’s is wondering about a video getting some traction on YouTube these days that shows employees doing gross things as they make Domino’s sandwiches. Domino’s decided not to respond to the video online, reports Ad Age, fearing a strong response would cause more people to go watch the video (I’m not posting the video link here, by the way, because I thought it was too tasteless to share, sorry). This won’t be the last time something like this surfaces, how should companies respond? What is the right level of outrage for something like this?
Comments
All publicity is not necessarily good publicity, but with the emergence of so many tools that give companies the ability to respond publicly to anything at anytime, even bad publicity can be turned into a good opportunity.
In conversation marketing every bit of the market conversation should be considered and used to better a company's products, processes, business decisions, image, etc. Companies should not fear bad publicity--bad stuff happens, people react to how bad stuff/mistakes are handled.
With the Amazon de-listing of books this weekend (see this blog post for a summary http://tinyurl.com/lopws), they missed an opportunity to take a major company error and turn it into a positive and proactive approach to talking with their customers. Had they been monitoring the market conversation (yes, even over the weekend) they could have quickly replied to Mark Probst directly to apologize for the error in delisting the books, but also they could have reached out to all their customers and said, "hey, we're human, we screwed up and we know it, but we're going to do everything possible to rectify the situation asap. Today and tomorrow, we will be offering a 5% discount on all the books that were effected by this."
Responding to negative issues that are raised in the market conversation has to be timely and sincere. A response like this would not only apologize to the customers, but to the authors of those books as well.
Posted by: Christine Fife | April 16, 2009 2:49 PM
Domino's DID decide to do a video in response to their disgusting employees. It was a pretty long and detailed one, too. I believe they released it about 2 days after the gross video.
I thought it was very smart of them to use the same media tool, that could have/will very well destroy them, to try and fix the problem. They took a huge risk of directing more attention to the scandal - we'll see if it works.
Posted by: Mayumi | April 30, 2009 5:10 PM