Motrin recently launched a new set of ads for baby week in an effort to connect with their market. The ads aren't that bad in my mind, but I'm by no means a baby-toting mommy.The epic failure that has virally grown out of this new campaign is what's happening on Twitter. Popular tweeter and mommy Jessica Gottlieb piped in with some opinions about the new ads and rapidly won support of moms and twitter users, arguing that the ads don't truly understand the market, and speak down to the audience. This isn't new. Moms have been complaining forever.
So that happened on the weekend.
Have Motrin brand managers, community managers, PR people, or parent-company reps (Johnson & Johnson owns both Motrin and Tylenol) joined the conversation? Is there an official response? The real problem is that huge companies like this aren't nimble enough to be waiting in the wings when a new campaign launches to immediately respond (conversationally) with detractors. Imagine if after the first blog post or tweet, J&J had their community team reach out to these bloggers and tweeters and dig a little deeper. --Or even better, show the top 5 mommy bloggers the ads AHEAD of time as your test audience. Get their feedback, and tweak as necessary...
(From the motrin.com homepage, an official message from marketing...)
We are in the age of people-publishing, and as cool as the ads look-- it's about the response from the blogosphere that will make it or break it online. Reputation management is not a monthly meeting with your PR agency; It's a minute-by-minute strategy that has to be real-time and deployable and adaptable at a moments notice.