When initiating a viral social media campaign, companies should never ignore the concerns of the audience they’re trying to reach.
They also should never send a spam tweet that could be considered offensive to a marketing expert with a well-established Internet presence.
Ragú, a popular spaghetti sauce brand owned by food giant Unilever, unfortunately did both last year when attempting to launch a Twitter marketing campaign with a video of mom bloggers criticizing their husbands’ poor cooking habits. The two-minute video — which is, admittedly, rather boring and condascendingly sexist — was sent via spam messages from Ragú’s Twitter account to a few dads with an Internet presence.
Ragú’s solution for dads who can’t cook? Use their sauce — it makes cooking easier for the seemingly incompetent male population. The brand’s social media managers most likely thought dads would find the campaign amusing, blog or tweet a response to the mom bloggers, and then spread the message.
Responses from dads, however, were anything but amused. Many criticized Ragú’s video for implying men are incapable of cooking (and, likewise, that women are more apt to do housework-type activities like cooking, circa 1950s). A prominent blogger, author and online marketing expert, C.C. Chapman, received the tweet and immediately took to his blog to criticize its poor taste with a post entitled “Ragú hates dads.” Soon after, he kindly offered the company advice on how to improve its strategies for the future. But he also vowed he would never consider buying Ragú.
Chapman wrote a few follow-up blog posts and it took Ragú almost 24 hours respond. Finally, the brand contacted Chapman and later posted a generalized response that still didn’t leave Chapman or other dad bloggers satisfied. You can read it here.
As Chapman said in his blog posts, I think whoever planned Ragú’s Twitter campaign was severely unaware of how to successfully engage an audience with social media. The campaign touched on a sensitive subject in a discriminatory manner that could be offensive to some people. Ragú sent the message to several dads in an impersonal way, and when they responded negatively, Ragú took too look to reply — and even when it did, there was no real person to interact with, just someone hidden behind the persona of a jar of sauce.
Social media should be a two-way conversation between a company and its consumers. When Ragú’s Twitter campaign went awry, it went silent. It was a poor marketing strategy that left the brand more damaged than when it had started.
I don’t think Ragú really “hates dads” — but it certainly doesn’t know how to interact with them on social media.
Tags: C.C. Chapman, marketing, professionalism, Ragu, social media, spam, Twitter
1:22 pm - 9-24-2012
Alissa, great post! I remember hearing about this when it happened, but I did not pay much attention to it. It’s hard to believe that such a large company would be so careless. So many social media mistakes like this one could be avoided if staff took the time to think about the consequences of certain campaigns.
8:04 pm - 9-24-2012
Alissa, I laughed so hard when I read what a mess Ragu made of their Twitter account. Seriously- aren’t large corporations supposed to be incredibly cautious around any stereotypes? It’s an unwritten rule also that using sarcasm a lot of the time (unless it is VERY obvious) is generally considered something to avoid just for safety’s sake, so something exactly like this does not happen. Journalism 101 Ragu…
10:38 pm - 9-24-2012
I can’t believe Ragu would use such a sexist campaign to try and sell their product. That is such a careless way to promote their product and it is ridiculous that they thought it would not upset people. You would think someone in their public relations office would say this is not a good idea and could cause a lot of problems. Hopefully they learned their lesson, although it came as a result of a large hit to their reputation and brand.
9:24 pm - 9-30-2012
I had never heard of this incident until now, but I’m glad I did! That sounds like such an easy thing that could have been avoided. It is hard to believe that in the chain of people who had to work on the video, not one person thought “This might be a bad idea”. It’s still seen in tons of commercials about food items and any type of cleaning product that it is always a woman doing the cooking and cleaning, but to highlight that stereotype even more? Not a good move. I like what you said about social media being a two-way conversation. It’s a great way to interact with customers in a more personal way, but they can’t expect to not receive backlash for a risky topic.