The past two years have brought us a good deal of PR crisis situations and over the coming weeks, I’ll be reviewing some of the most interesting and discussing what lessons they reveal. Kicking off the list are two disasters connected to controversial commercials that came from Snickers and Volkswagen.
Volkswagen Apologizes for Racist Ad
Volkswagen famously faced a major emissions scandal in 2015 that still follows the company but it’s not done facing down PR crises. The company faced another reputation disaster after introducing its new Golf 8.
The brand released a 9-second video featuring a large white hand moving and flicking a black man. Then, the German tagline “Der Neue Golf” (which means “The New Golf”) fades in, with the letters ‘neger’ appearing first (which people pointed out, could be used as the german equivalent of the n-word).
Of course, people immediately called out the video as racist. It’s one thing to have a video intended to convey an idea, end up mistakenly appearing racist, but in this case, it’s hard to even figure out what the foundational concept of the ad was. As one commenter put it ‘I have no ‘frigging’ idea what this ad is even trying to tell me.’
Volkswagen quickly issued an apology in which it committed to greater diversity on its teams and improvements to its approvals process as a means to ensuring such a blunder never reoccurs. It blamed a “lack of sensitivity and procedural errors” for its failure to prevent the creation and publication of the video. The video was also removed from the brand’s social media accounts.
Snickers Withdraws Spanish Ad Following Backlash
For a while now, Snickers commercials have played around with a variety of silly storylines that all end with a transformation and the words ‘you’re not you when you’re hungry.’ The format is quite popular and loved by audiences but the company seemingly bit off more than it could chew when it aired a commercial that stirred controversy as it was taken by some to be homophobic.
After transforming, one man asks, ‘better?’ and the other replies ‘better.’ While Snickers most likely did not intend to imply that there was something ‘wrong’ with the behavior of the actor before the transformation, it’s not difficult to see the transformation was a potential minefield and was almost inevitably going to cause a flurry of negative backlash online.
And sure enough, the brand did receive a barrage of negative comments, including from Spain’s equality minister. Snickers later apologized for the “miscommunication” and removed the video.
Takeaways
From these cases and my own experiences with clients, I’d say the key lessons here are that social listening (not to be confused with media monitoring of your brand mentions) is vital. Social listening involves keeping in touch with what netizens think and how they react to a variety of things. While you can’t please everyone, it’s not impossible to avoid such a situation. It also is important to test commercials and other content amongst a diverse group of people before putting them out. Most importantly, shore up your organizational approvals process so that anything going out has been reviewed by multiple decision makers who (presumably) have a stronger sense of what makes for bad optics.
Here’s the run-down:
Pre-crisis:
- Social listening
- Message-testing
During crisis:
- Apology statement addressing how it happened
- Take the content down / announce a change in problematic policies,
- Commit to hearing from more diverse voices through DEI initiatives and sensitivity training
- Make improvements to policies and processes
Post-crisis:
- CSR: Make moves that are beneficial to groups you’ve offended, and society in general (+ it doesn’t hurt to amplify said moves)
- Review crisis plan to ensure adequate measures are in place going forward
CONTROL, by Fiayo. 