Brandjack News

News and commentary around the concept of brandjacking

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  • Nestlé’s Beneful dog food faces legal challenge

    By Quentin Langley

    CNN is reporting a legal action against Nestlé over the alleged health complications associated with its Purina Beneful brand.

    While, obviously, no-one is suggesting that Nestlé deliberately set out to poison dogs, there is a suggestion that they knew it was harmful and sold it without proper investigation of the reports of problems. Nestlé, of course, denies this. A key part of settling this, then, will be the facts. If the plaintiffs are able to make their case then Nestlé will have to apologise and compensate. If they cannot make their case then that ought to be an end to it. Of course, it may not be.

    People continue to make the demonstrably false case that vaccines cause autism. Others insist that George W Bush plotted the 9/11 attacks or that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or that the moon landings were faked. 

    So even if Nestlé can produce convincing evidence that Beneful is good for dogs and not bad for them there will still be ongoing damage to its reputation.

    This one is going to run for a while, and win, lose, or draw the case, there is going to be long term reputation damage.

  • #SpeakBeautiful campaign a big risk

    By Quentin Langley

    Apparently women tweet five million times a year with negative comments about their body and self image. Dove wanted to do something about this and so, built around the Oscars, it launched a campaign to get people to #SpeakBeautiful

    Any time you campaign around a hashtag you create a risk. The tag #McDStories bounced rather badly on McDonalds. The problem is that you have no control over how people will actually use the hashtag but can easily be caught in the blowback. McDonalds should have recognised that it has a dedicated band of critics who share an analysis of what is wrong with McDonalds. They are more likely to share each other's content than the much larger group of people who buy burgers under the Golden Arches. 

    Dove is not as contentious as McDonalds, but is nonetheless inviting similar criticism. For all sorts of reasons – maybe humorously or maybe out of an objection to Dove, and its owners, Unilever, people were always going to chime in with negative comments.

    This has not been researched yet, but a quick search for the hashtag shows more positive comments than negative. That's to be expected but, significantly (and also to be expected) the negative comments may be getting better traction.

    Some detailed research into how much content sharing went on, and how much was negative, would make very interesting reading.

    For the moment, shall we just say this is probably not the sort of thing that Dove was aiming at:

    Amanda Nelson ‏@ImAmandaNelson  3h3 hours ago

    Dove's parent company pushes skin-lightening creams to Asian women but hey if I say nice things I guess I'll feel better? #SpeakBeautiful

  • Gaming the reviews

    By Quentin Langley

    How do you buy a bed? Or a sofa? Or select a hotel or cab company in a city you have never visited? Such occasional or first time purchases require some thought and research. The item may be expensive. Or it may be that you have invested time – your precious vacation days – in a choice and want your vacation to go smoothly.

    Digital platforms ought to provide a solution. It is so easy to post a review online. And there is no doubt that sites like TripAdvisor can be influential. That's evidenced by the fact that hotels fine guests for posting poor reviews.

    That's an example of gaming the system in itself. If you are trying to bias the sample of reviews then you are corrupting the system. If I ran TripAdvisor I would clamp down on this and not allow reviews – or perhaps even bookings – for hotels with this policy. 

    But this is not the worst gaming of the system that goes on. People buy fake five star reviews for their own company and fake zero or one star reviews for their competitors. PBS exposed the practice a short while ago.

    The deception involved is blatant:

    MAN: I have not been to Miami, but I would certainly take a review from Miami, yes.

    JACKIE JUDD: What would you say?

    MAN: I would say, Clipboard Cab Company was very prompt in their service. They arrived exactly at 7:00 at the airport, when I had asked them to arrive. I found the driver very, very pleasant and cooperative, and I was very satisfied with the service. I will definitely use it again next time I’m in Miami.

    A friend pointed out to me the reviews on a moving company in New York last year. One was extremely negative speaking unreliability and lost and broken items. Below was a response from the company saying that an identically worded review had been submitted for all but one of the companies in the local market. We are entitled to be suspicious as to who was responsible here. 

    There are signs we can look for. Fake reviews are almost always five star or zero/one star. Mixed comments are much more likely to be genuine. But if we discount the best and the worst reviews then fake reviewers will start submitting two and four star reviews instead.

    While Amazon actively seeks reviews for products that it knows I have actually bought, it does not seem to prevent me writing reviews for products which I have not purchased. (I didn't follow through and write a review, though, so there may be some later cut off). 

    The only sensible advice is to read reviews sensibly and try to pick out the generic boilerplate reviews. But what else would one write about a cab company, other than that which was covered above? Even a genuine review is going to seem generic.

  • Giuliani’s unhinged attacks on Obama

    By Quentin Langley

    Let us suppose that you believe – as Rudy Giuliani presumably believes – that President Obama's policies are disastrously wrong for America. There are at least two explanations for the president's preference for such disastrous policies: either he wants the US to fail or he is misguided enough to believe that these policies are actually sensible. These are the same two explanations for any other political leader – Giuliani included – adopting policies which you think are disastrously wrong.

    Decent people should generally give the other side the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith naivete. Too often this good faith is lacking with people all too happy to believe that George W Bush was in the pay of nefarious interests and that he personally plotted the 9/11 attacks.

    To make the opposite assumption not only generally sounds unhinged – damaging the speaker more than the target – it also distracts from your main message. After all, if a set of policies is damaging then it is precisely as damaging if adopted foolishly as it would be adopted maliciously. It is always better to focus on why you think the policies are wrong than to allow the debate to go down a meandering path about people's motives. 

    So how, then, should Giuliani's fellow Republicans respond. Senator Marco Rubio – whose Senate career was launched with significant help from Giuliani – managed a pitch perfect response.

    I don’t feel like I’m in a position to have to answer for every person in my party that makes a claim. Democrats aren’t asked to answer every time Joe Biden says something embarrassing, so I don’t know why I should answer every time a Republican does. I’ll suffice it to say that I believe the President loves America; I think his ideas are bad.

    As Chris Cillizza pointed out in the Washington Post this response this hits all the right notes for someone seeking the Republican nomination for president (as Rubio probably is):

    1. He manages to get in digs at the media and at the gaffe-prone vice-president.

    2. He makes the right call on the president's motives.

    3. He switches straight back to the policies.

    Talent matters in a primary campaign. As I pointed out on this blog in 2011, Barack Obama's election demonstrates how talent – especially rhetorical talent – matters once again. Rubio has the same sort of charisma and will be a formidable candidate if he continues to combine that talent with good judgment. 

  • The Williams fiasco

    By Quentin Langley

    So Brian Williams has taken six months off from his role as managing editor and anchor for NBC. 

    It was inevitable and I rather doubt he will be coming back. It is very difficult to take seriously his claim that he accidentally "conflated" the memory of being in a helicopter that was hit by an RPG and had to make an emergency landing with the fact that he was not in the helicopter, though he may have been in another one nearby.

    Even his claim to have been in the following helicopter is difficult to reconcile with the memory of Lance Reynolds that Williams turned up an hour later. 

    Of course, if Williams was in a copter that had to make an emergency landing because another copter in the convoy had been hit, that would have been frightening and probably very memorable. But even under these circumstances – and even Williams has not offered this excuse – the flood of relief on realising later that his copter had not been hit would also have been memorable.

    Just like the now-crticised stories from Hurricane Katrina, Williams's story puts him closer to the action – and by implication make him seem more heroic – than the facts. This not only makes him less trustworthy, it makes him less likable, and they will both be problems if NBC ever wants to bring him back. That's very unlikely to happen.

    Media stories about false memory syndrome seem like journalists rallying round to one of their own. The examples given mostly involve either people being manipulated into creating false memories from their childhood or people misremembering minor details. George W Bush, for example, recalled watching the plane hit the first tower on live TV. That wasn't broadcast live, though the second plane hitting was. That's a pretty small detail. It is not as if Bush remembered being in New York and watching it live, or rescuing someone from the rubble. That would be much closer to the self-aggrandising "memories" of Brian Williams. 

     

  • Leave the kids out of it

    By Quentin Langley

    Elizabeth Lauten has resigned from her job as an aide to a Republican Congressman after making derogatory remarks about Sasha and Malia Obama, the President's teenage daughters. She accused them of lacking class in a Facebook post that, well, lacked class. 

    It is easy to talk up the political significance of this – and the MSM has been doing this. The Telegraph described Lauten as a "senior Republican spin doctor". As it happens, the editor of this blog is a political columnist with an American newspaper and had not only never heard of Lauten but also never heard of Stephen Fincher, the two-term Republican congressman for whom she worked. Lauten's entry in Wikipedia is new, is an "orphan", meaning no other articles link to it, and contains nothing other than the story of her resignation from a job that no-one outside her immediate family knew that she had. 

    Lauten's error of judgement was, however, a significant one. People are protective of children. Barack and, at least to an extent, Michelle, Obama have chosen to put themselves in the public eye. Sasha and Malia did not. And yet they are rolled out as props for trivial events such as the president "pardoning" a Turkey before Thanksgiving. Their mode of attire was typical of modern teenagers, and might even be considered conservative. They were showing no cleavage; their arms and shoulders were covered; though both were wearing short skirts. Both teens seemed about as bored by the whole thing as anyone would expect.

    That Lauten thought it was her place to comment on Sasha' amd Mailia's attitude to the pardoning of a Turkey reflects the peculiar American attitude of treating "first families" like royalty, where someone's opinions and fashion choices are taken seriously simply because of their marriage or parentage.

  • When brands collide

    By Quentin Langley

    Celebrities and politicians have dedicated groups of fans in a way that commerce can only envy. There is a sense of purpose about politics that creates loyalty. You support political causes for a reason, and don't change allegiance for reasons of convenience, only when there is some deeper underlying cause.

    So, it is a potential problem when a retailer finds itself caught up in a fight between a celebrity and a politician. Here are the bullet points.

    Littlewoods – a UK department store – decided to use Myleene Klass – a singer and celebrity – in its Christmas advertising campaign. Then Klass had a very public spat with Ed Miliband – Leader of the opposition Labour Party – over his plans for a "mansion tax". Does Littlewoods, which is not a particularly upscale retailer, want to be associated with the millionaire celebrity in her battle against a new property tax.

    In the debate itself it is fair to say no-one emerges with much credit. Klass left Miliband lost for words in a debate on the issue in which she claimed that £2 million ($3.1 m) only buys you a garage in London. Property prices in London are steep, but not that steep. In fairly central Camden, where this author lives, £2m can buy a 3-4 bedroom family home.

    A couple of days later Miliband hit back. His tweet, refuting Klass's claims and quoting her first hit was heavily retweeted by Labour supporters. In these days of business at the speed of light it is, perhaps, embarrassing that a leading politician – who might be Prime Minister in a matter of months – requires a two-day conclave with his adivsors before he can come up with a response to a naive attack from a shallow celebrity, so Labour hardly emerges looking professional. 

    But the fact that Klass is wrong on the facts and Miliband is out of his depth in social media does not mean that the middle of this this second-rate fight between two third-rate fighters is where Littlewoods wants to be.

    Klass has fans. Miliband has supporters – or, at least, the Labour Party does. Littlewoods merely has customers. If it offends some by lining up with Klass it does not mean it will pick up new customers from people who support parties other than Labour.

    This is a fight with three losers and no winners. 

    For a different tak on this debate see Myths and Memes by Robin Croft.

     

  • An Uber mistake

    By Quentin Langley

    Threatening journalists is really bad form for a PR professional. It is all about building relationships. The clue is in the name. Emil Michael, of Uber, said that the company could spend a million dollars digging dirt on journalists. Apparently, he did not mean that he was recommending this, merely that it would be justified in the case of journalists who were irredeemably hostile.

    Journalists dig dirt. It is their job. But if we are talkng about ethical behaviour then responding in kind seems impossible to justify – at least, not unless one adopts a very narrow definition of "dirt". 

    Let us suppose a journalist was reporting negative information or writing negative opinions about Uber. If research suggested that the journalist had a record of writing false or biased material about other businesses in the past then it would be very reasonable to hit back by making this public. But if the research suggested that the journalist had cheated on a romantic partner then trying to secure better coverage by blackmail would be grossly unethical. 

    Uber has distanced itself. CEO Travis Kalanick gave Michael a very public dressing down on Twitter and declared that Michael's duties did not involve having any input to communications strategy. Nonetheless, this incident has greatly damaged Uber's relationships with journalists and the wider public.

    Uber already faces a great deal of hostility from vested interests in the taxi industry. In New York cab drivers invest very substantial sums purchasing the limited number of "medallions" which are designed to keep prices high. In London black cab drivers must invest several years in studying "the knowledge" – memorising the complex layout of London's streets. That was actually useful before the invention of the satnav.

    Naturally, these groups campaign against Uber and its drivers and customers. In such a febrile atmosphere it should not be hard for Uber to occupy the moral high ground. Abandoning it was very, very, bad move.

  • Russell Brandjacked

    Dr Robin Croft, University of Bedfordshire

    Dr Nigel Williams, Bournemouth University

     

    Russell Brand's new book Revolution was published by Cornerstone on 23 October.  The book was already in the bestseller charts before it appeared in the stores due to advance purchases.  Brand's publishers and PR agency arranged the usual round of TV and radio appearances, as well as widespread press coverage and reviews. 

     

    Things started to go wrong on about the 26th.  Twitter user @paperclipracket made the connection between Brand's prose (based on a Daily Mail review of Revolution) and Parklife, a 1994 Britpop song from Blur.  The idea took hold, but the #parklife hashtag only really became a meme on 3 November when it was discovered by internet marketer @danbarker. 

     

    As we have noted in a blog posting last week, #parklife then became the virtual interjection of choice for a generation for whom the greatest crime is to take oneself too seriously.  The controversy served to keep Revolution in the news (and in the book charts), but why was Brand piqued by it, and why was it regarded as being insulting?

     

    The original connection, we believe, was made based on the similarities between the Essex-boy accents being used by Blur and Brand, and the tendency to rant incoherently.  #Parklife became a catchy, catch-all insult that could be creatively applied to anything remotely pompous or verbose.  As the meme 'trended' the videos and mashups appeared, went viral and kept #parklife current.

     

    Brand and his publicity team, of course, were well aware of how to ride the meme, and his own Twitter feed quickly started employing the hashtag also.  Today (November 10) he has released his own Parklife video, a parody which parodies the parodies.  Russell can take a joke.  Business as usual.

     

     

     

     

  • Sainsbury’s slip up and Guardian’s bad journalism

    By Quentin Langley

    UK supermarket, Sainsbury's, has incentives in place for its staff to encourage shoppers to buy more. You would think this is nothing remotely odd, but it is slightly embarrassing that a poster aimed at staff was displayed in a store, photographed, and tweeted. The image has been retweeted almost five thousand times at the time of writing. They want to encourage every customer to spend an extra 50p (81 cents).

    Twitterati, of course, had their own suggestions. Perhaps staff will slip a few extra items in a shop or scan an item costing 50p twice.

    In an article on its business pages the Guardian seems to have abandoned even the slightest pretense of separating news and comment. I suppose we could argue that the Guardian confusing news and comment is as surprising as a supermarket trying to sell products to shoppers.

    But the newspaper's incomprehension of voluntary exchange is so deep and so visceral that a simple offer of cut price chocolate with a newspaper at W H Smith is described as "force feed[ing] customers giant slabs of chocolate at the cash register". This unhinged metaphor would be out of place in a tabloid comment column but is included as normal in the Guardian's business coverage.