The Ethical Optimist

A co-worker alerted me to a recent story on Pepsi and its use of social media to apologize one-to-one for an offensive suicide ad it ran abroad. The story was written by Chris Abraham, a blogger for Ad Age.

Abraham comments on the fact that a Pepsi rep quickly responded to his tweet on the ad with a very personal e-mail apology. The rep, B. Bonin also allowed Abraham to post his email. Abraham noted that:

I know you all think I am going to mock Bonin, but I won’t. I think this was a very bold and risky maneuver and worthy of praise rather than a tarring and feathering. And his outreach to me, a nobody, was accomplished within two days.

Others, however, quickly trashed the effort seeing it as a marketing ploy. A few felt that the ad was simply inexcusable.

Frankly, I’m with Abraham. Organizations the size of PepsiCo are going to make mistakes. That’s the nature of the beast. One writer took the company to task saying he couldn’t understand how the ad got past the boardroom. He’s kidding, right? Let’s face it, in a global organization with thousands of employees, a few mistakes are going to slip past the powers that be. The guys in the boardroom aren’t reviewing every ad, memo and the like, for every market.

However, the fact that a monolith like Pepsi was able to use a variety of communication channels to respond to the issue, quickly pull the ad and make amends is commendable.

Social media is just one more tool to quickly get the word out. It’s not a solution in and of itself, but one of many, hence the fact that this made news.

One of the great things about transparency and the globalization/speed of communication is that people are raising the bar and expecting companies to behave more ethically.

The internet makes it impossible for any marketer to control which geographies and demographics see any particular communication. You can’t even really control what media it appears in. Think you’re creating an edgy print ad that will only be seen in a German magazine? Think again. In the blink of an eye, your ad is on the web. You know, the world wide one. And all kinds of people are pissed off.

My question is this, are our expectations realistic? Are they fair? Can we truly expect that companies, which are made up of individuals, will never make mistakes? Isn’t the issue here how they respond to those mistakes and prevent them in future?

One consumer wrote that they now plan to boycott Pepsi. Isn’t this a bit extreme? Another blogger commented that this is all a deliberate effort to get more attention. Yeah, sure, Pepsi is going to deliberately open itself up to negative criticism (on a sensitive issue like Suicide) to sell product…does this guy truly believe that? If he does, I suggest he sit in on a few marketing meetings.

This leads me to another point. The blogosphere is a lot like democracy. In giving everyone a voice, those who participate have to weed out thoughtful legitimate comments from those that are a bit more asinine. The price way pay for transparency is in having to filter and verify the messages.

I think Pepsi is doing the right thing under difficult circumstances. In the end, the fact that consumers were able to alert the company to a problem was a tremendous benefit to the organization. In this case, social media provided a critical two-way dialog that benefits both the consumers (who don’t have to see an objectionable ad) and PepsiCo, which was able to quickly correct the mistake.