Dr Pepper’s Facebook Fiasco May Have Negligible Impact
Lean Mean Fighting Machine, the UK agency that won Coca Cola’s Dr. Pepper account came up with a wildly risky Facebook campaign. And the executives at Dr. Pepper signed off on it.
Carrying on from a porn(ish) viral video, they created a new campaign using a Facebook app that takes over your status update (if you let it). There was a chance to win £1,000 if you let the app have it’s way and post what promised to be embarrassing status updates under your account. Here’s the story in better detail.
I think the idea behind the campaign was ingenious. Risky, impractical but ingenious nonetheless. It gave the agency and Dr. Pepper an indicator for just how much trust they had (and they probably never again will) with their market. I don’t see how else they could get such quality of information from their fans.
It was risky because it put the personal status updates of your fans in the hands of a third party agency that may not necessarily subscribe to your views on morals, ethics etc.
Impractical because to mitigate the risk would involve having Dr. Pepper executives involved in the approval process for every single update that was sent out by the application.
Dr. Pepper’s immediate reaction when things began to go south did not elicit feelings of confidence in the brand/company. An inappropriate update was posted on a fourteen year old’s wall and seen by her mother who promptly made a complaint about it. The company responded by offering her a night out on the town! She didn’t accept their offer and continued to make complaints. They eventually pulled the campaign.
The campaign was costly mostly because their 160,000+ fans were not pleased about it being discontinued. The campaign was opt-in only so everyone knew what they were getting themselves into including the prospect of winning £1,000. How much of a dent did it put on the Dr. Pepper brand? Very little in my opinion. Dr. Pepper is not new to these kind of stunts or controversy. Should they have pulled the plug? Maybe. Should they have built some functionality in the app to validate age of participants? Maybe. Would I have handled this any different? Probably 🙂
What impact will this fiasco have on their sales? On existing brand perceptions? I think the impact will be so small, it will barely be noise on the radar. What do you think?
The real loser? The guys at Lean Mean Fighting Machine. They came up with an idea, got it signed off on and now are set to loose a lucrative account they have only held for three or four months.
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