Things I didn't know last week- November 29th 2008 Twitter and Motrinoms

This is a post in a regular weekly series about things I've learned or come to realise during the previous week.

This week "Twitter and the Motrinmoms"

Recently there was a huge kerfuffle in the Twittersphere about an advert produced by the company that makes Motrin pain relief tablets. The advert itself seemed fairly innocuous to me. It highlighted a problem caused by "wearing" babies in slings and proposed a solution for this problem.

Fair enough.

Except it annoyed and alienated a huge section of its target audience - sling wearing, baby carrying moms.

I viewed the ad and didn't find anything that worried or concerned me (Certainly it isn't as bad as, say, the hair care product which identified those who answered negative in a survey they ran as "probably not having any friends"). However I am not a women, nor a mother, nor have I ever carried a baby in the way described, so I am not really the demographic this ad is aimed at.

Anyway it has stirred up a real storm on Twitter. Apparently mothers are furious over it, claiming it wrong, misleading, patronising and insulting.

There are two things that probably need to be brought out from this:

1) Market research regarding your potential market is probably good when putting out advertisments like this.
2) Failure to monitor the reaction on social networks is unacceptable. Regardless of whether the ad was released on a Saturday or Sunday, social media is now so prevalent that a reaction can be stirred up at any point and needed to be monitered. Every minute that no reply came form the company more and more people where weighing in with their opinions. Once the company put up it's apology the whole affair seemed to just disappear.

What was even more interesting was Seth Godin's take on the actual apology from Motrin. Read about it here: He basically said they missed another opportunity by not being up-front and personal with their apology. As usual Seth was right....


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