Sometime this weekend, Motrin IB reached out to Mommy Bloggers with a snarky video about the dangers of carrying your baby in a sling and the back pain it causes. Enter Motrin stage right… right? Wrong.
Some groups respond well to snark. Hormonal new mothers with postpartum depression and nesting instincts? Not so much. The ad blew up in Motrin’s face almost as fast as it went viral. (Some people are saying it only took 3 hours.) Twitter immediately went into bad PR overdrive, led by JessciaGottlieb (Hint: as of this writing, her twitter bio reads, “Easily outraged, often wrong, seldom apologetic.”)
Two thousand tweets later “motrinmoms” surpassed “SNL” as the number one search term on Twitter since Obama was elected. The overwhelming majority of tweets are talking about they’ll never use Motrin again… Overreaction or not, this is the reality Motrin’s managed to create for itself in a little under 48 hours.
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but the ball is now squarely in Motrin’s court to prove that theory true. So far, all they’ve done is issue an official apology and take the video off their site. Boooooring.
Motrin has managed to actually engage their audience. That’s half of the battle, maybe more, in today’s info-satured marketplace. Will they take this opportunity to reach out to a powerful & vocal group whose feelings they’ve managed to tap into? Will they make good use of their target market’s rapt attention, which they now command? Why not release another ad? Why not turn the snark on themselves with an ad about the social media marketing pain they’re feeling?
Whatever they do, the loudest-first-adopter-mommies are listening, which was the point in the first place. Now Motrin just has to come up with something they want to hear.