The Biggest Brand Mistakes and Social Trends 2024 PT1

Speaker 2: 0:04

Welcome to socially unacceptable, from f**k up to fame, the marketing podcast that celebrates the professional mishaps, mistakes and misjudgments, while delivering valuable marketing and life lessons in the time it takes you to eat your lunch.

Speaker 3: 0:22

Hi everybody, welcome back to socially acceptable with me, chris Norton and my co-host Will Ockenden. How you doing Will.

Speaker 1: 0:28

Thanks. And you got there eventually, didn't you? After the 10th take.

Speaker 3: 0:30

Yeah well, this show is about mistakes, so let's just go with it. We are the co-owners of Prohibition. We've been running socially acceptable for about eight months now. This week we've hit 34,000 subscribers, so thanks very much for that, guys. Thanks for listening. This show is all about marketing mistakes and what you can learn and take away from that, and because we like to celebrate marketing mistakes, there's a load in here from what went wrong in 2023, because we're looking forward to 2024 and beyond. So this week is all about social media trends. It's our most popular event. We just held a webinar last week and we got more than 200 marketers on it, and we've got two more events coming up as well. But today's a special peak behind the curtain, so you can see what we're covering, what do you think Will?

Speaker 1: 1:14

Well, I don't like the term peak behind the curtain.

Speaker 3: 1:17

That's because you're peaking behind the curtain. It's very different to most other people.

Speaker 1: 1:20

We'll go with it and I think the value here for listeners is it's really going to give you food for thought in terms of what essential developments in the world of social media are coming up, and these are developments that are going to potentially supercharge your marketing, supercharge your lead gen, and there's going to be a real abundance of value in this session today, I think.

Speaker 3: 1:41

Yeah, but unfortunately you're going to have to listen to me and Will talking because we've got no guests, so we're going to have to bring the banter.

Speaker 3: 1:47

Well, we're going to have to be entertaining and interesting, which, let's face it, you're going to struggle with. So what we're going to cover this week is what happened in 2023, brands that have got it absolutely 100% right and we think should be celebrated but, more entertainingly, brands that got it wrong, because we always like to look at who got it wrong. And then we're going to look at 2024 social media trends. Will's going to discuss some of the things that we've spotted at prohibition for our clients and also looking at the wider reports in the industry what's coming up and what is interesting and we make predictions. We don't always get them right. Will says every year that we're going to get 100% right. What do you think this year will? What percent are you going?

Speaker 1: 2:26

to get right 90%, I'd say 90%.

Speaker 3: 2:29

I'm going to let you guys be the judges of how accurate that is. We've been doing this for eight years, so let's go through what we predicted last year.

Speaker 1: 2:37

And the final point actually worth mentioning is we're going to talk about how marketers can actually put these trends into action, because that's feedback we get a lot, isn't it? Yeah, people are kind of super enthused after hearing about all these great developments and then they go back to the day job and it's like how on earth do we roll these out? And implement them. So we're going to be talking about how to do that. So, as a bit of a starting point, chris, why should people care about this? Why should we care about trends?

Speaker 3: 3:01

Well, that's a very good question, will? Trends are important because they give you a competitive edge. You've got the ability to engage with niche audiences. You can position your brand as bleeding edge and innovative if you're on top of what is coming out. And also, finally, you get more for less from your marketing budget. The less spend, you can get more from it if you use some emerging trends. So that's what today's show is all about. So, talking about getting more from less, you have to be careful. Always be clear about why you are doing something. In terms of social media, a lot of people out there just go out and go. Oh, we want to be on this platform because it's the new emerging platform. Let's just take a step back. Before you do that, ask yourself are my audience on this platform? Is this platform going to stay around? For instance, who remembers these three Hollywood babies, vine? Do you remember that? Will?

Speaker 1: 3:54

I'll do it briefly.

Speaker 3: 3:55

Six second videos. Vine was brilliant actually. That was the Vine sort of created short form video in mind. It sort of came out, boomed everywhere and then just seemed to die a death.

Speaker 1: 4:06

What happened to it? Why did it die out?

Speaker 3: 4:08

I don't know. I swear down. One of the other platforms bought it, but it was a six second. For those of you that don't know, it was a six second video platform, very much about short, short punchy videos. Sound familiar, I suppose, with today's technology. Similarly, another one that you might remember, or you might not, depending on your age Meerkat, which was Twitter's live video. It was a thing that shared live video. Obviously, now you can do that from Twitter. Anyway, you can do Twitter live. So Meerkat just again died a death, but there was a famous live that was a puddle, that was online for 24 hours.

Speaker 1: 4:45

I remember that hashtag puddle watch Then you get millions of viewers tuning in at one point, yeah, I remember. Wasn't that during the pandemic or something.

Speaker 3: 4:53

Yeah, no, it wasn't during the pandemic.

Speaker 1: 4:55

Was that another puddle? There was another puddle. I think you've got a different subscription to me.

Speaker 3: 5:00

I don't just watch different puddles and then finally, one that was really big, the most recent of the three that everybody said was going to be massive, and we saw agencies jumping on it. It was Clubhouse. So Clubhouse was like an audio party that you could online and basically it was an app that you could download and people were meeting in there and hosting events. It was kind of like an audio Twitter and then, unfortunately, twitter then copycatted it with Spaces allegedly Close Brackets and Twitter Spaces came out and obviously Clubhouse is now you don't really hear that much about it.

Speaker 3: 5:36

So my point is there's always a new platform coming out. You're always looking for what you can do to target your customers, but don't just jump necessarily all guns blazing into the latest platform, because sometimes they just don't stand the test of time and you can just waste so much time.

Speaker 1: 5:52

I mean, you think of the commitment, the time commitment alone, to go all in on a new channel or a new innovation. The reality is, some of these emerging platforms just aren't going to last, are they? So, yeah, as Chris said, be guided by the data and look at what your audience are doing and if they are on one of these platforms, go for it. If they're not, maybe hold on a bit.

Speaker 3: 6:12

So then will, as I said, always predicts that we're between 90 and 100% that we're going to get right. Let's just take a hilarious look at what we did predict last year.

Speaker 1: 6:21

So last year we predicted, and let's see if you remember, these will multi-century social, so why don't you explain that for people that don't know what that is?

Speaker 3: 6:30

Well, multi-sensory social. So you'd put VR headsets on, you'd get smells in stunt environments, very experiential events and stunts that you might see in a train station or something like that. We felt that that was really on the rise in 2022 and I had to be fair, I think that is still going. Social media stunts that are all sensory, sorry do seem to be popular, so I'd say that's a. Can we edit this in, guys? Can we have a ding on these?

Speaker 1: 7:01

I'd say that's. Yeah. It's not yet tipped into the mainstream, has it? But we'll say we got that one right, I think.

Speaker 3: 7:08

And then the second prediction we said for 2023 was a new social safety standard. So that was basically that more regulation, and the platforms themselves and the government would lock down safety, because a lot of social media is. Some of the social media is bad. The fact that I've got teenagers and the fact that teenagers can see suicidal content and things like that is terrible, and they can still see that stuff, but I've seen a lot of legislation in 2023 that did come out. Instagram are claiming that they've launched a load of new safety tools for youngsters and things like that. It's still not perfect, though, is it?

Speaker 1: 7:42

It's not, I mean. The danger is, a number of social networks are just playing lip service to the safety standards, aren't they? I mean, I saw recently TikTok has banned a negative body image trend called Leggins Leg on their platform. That's made all of the news and that's to be applauded. But how much of that is a smoke screen? How much else are they doing behind the scenes? And it's really hard to know. And I think the point is every social network needs to do more.

Speaker 3: 8:08

Yeah, they do. Teenagers need to be protected. That's just one example of an area that needs to be improved Social media regulation. So I'd say it has improved, so I think that might be a tick as well.

Speaker 1: 8:21

Yeah, good stuff, good stuff In certain eyes.

Speaker 3: 8:24

And the third prediction that we came up with was the move to a community mindset, and in that we meant that social media was going to become more community based on each platform. So you know, facebook groups, linkedin groups. There was going to be a much more of a community led social media and I'd say, I'd say that we've got that. I'd say that one is happening as well. We've seen a lot more community based social media platforms, so I think we've got that right. The fourth one we predicted was the decline of Twitter and the continued takeover of TikTok. I mean, if I can get a, I mean that we've absolutely nailed that one yeah absolutely.

Speaker 3: 8:56

To say we predicted that in January last year.

Speaker 1: 8:59

I don't think we could have predicted the degree to which Twitter would decline and the drama we'd see on that platform. Actually we're going to dig into that in a bit more detail in the deck, but yeah, probably of all the social networks, that's been the most turbulent, hasn't it, over the last 12 months, definitely.

Speaker 3: 9:14

And then the rise in augmented reality. So this one I'm going to put a not sure if it's risen, it's still where it was, I'm not sure. Augmented reality, where, you know, use your mobile phone for things to pop out of adverts, etc. Etc. What do you think?

Speaker 1: 9:27

Well, yeah, I think there's a lot of hype around augmented reality kind of midway through the year, but consumers just aren't adopting to it in in any kind of volumes, are they? And I think that's led a lot by the technology it's a bit like QR codes. You know the when QR codes first emerged they're really clunky. You had to have a special app to use them and people just weren't using them. And then suddenly they kind of smoothed out the technology.

Speaker 3: 9:50

The pandemic happened and everybody uses them and I think QR codes is interesting Because I remember articles about the death of the QR code and it was all gone. It was old technology, did it, did it, did it? Out comes pandemic and all of a sudden, oh look, you can get him. Then you, by clicking on the QR code. And then people were going what's a QR code?

Speaker 1: 10:06

I think the key thing with QR code, it's like vinyl, won't it, I think with? I mean, I don't know about Android, but on iPhone devices, you only need to now open the camera to access a QR code. Previously, you had to download a specific app and it's so clunky and awkward to do it so anyway, and then a few more that we've done.

Speaker 3: 10:24

We predicted the more sort of real social media, the B Real platform. We felt that people were going to be sharing more real imagery, which I think has happened. I'd say that's it.

Speaker 1: 11:39

Yeah, and I think, from a brand perspective and this has been driven by TikTok to a degree this kind of move towards authentic candid content has definitely been happening, hasn't it? People have been kind of rejecting this kind of overpolished ideal vision of social media that a lot of influencers push yeah, real versus what is it.

Speaker 3: 11:56

What's that? What's that thing where they've got two things on Instagram where it's something, then reality.

Speaker 1: 12:02

Oh well, I mean Instagram versus reality, instagram versus reality. Yeah, it's like that, isn't it yeah?

Speaker 3: 12:06

Yeah. Then we've got sustainability content is king. I'd say, yes, sustainable content is happening and is a thing. Then we've got content creator era. We nailed that one, I think that that's a big, big tick.

Speaker 3: 12:22

Platforms like LinkedIn are really focusing on content creators. You can see that on TikTok as well. They've really gone in with giving content creators money back for creating content, as YouTube have been doing it for years. But yeah, that's really really definitely happening. We also predicted native scheduling across all platforms. So, in other words, predicting scheduling content from the platforms natively rather than using tools would be better. I think that's fairly true.

Speaker 1: 12:50

Yeah, I think so. And yeah, you've seen kind of big developments in LinkedIn, for example, when it comes to native scheduling, in the last year. They want you on the platform, they don't want you using the buffers and the other platforms of this world.

Speaker 3: 13:03

And then the final one we predicted that we weren't sure but we said is coming is the metaverse. Meta didn't change its name for no reason, but still it still feels like. It's like that rainbow in the distance that you can never quite get to, isn't it the metaverse?

Speaker 1: 13:18

So what do you reckon? Ten billion dollars down, more than that, I mean. The investment is mind blowing, isn't it? Yeah, crazy, there's a lot of people working on the metaverse and for what you know, there's been no kind of consumer, no significant consumer facing proposition has there so far.

Speaker 3: 13:33

No. So what else happened in 2023 then? Well, we had the rise of social commerce. So, for those of you that don't know what social commerce is, that's using the power of social interactions, recommendations and user generated content. Social commerce drives sales and more engaging and inclusive shopping experience. So, for instance, it's like when you're on Instagram and you see something and you want to buy it, you can click it and go through it. That is social commerce. And just to look at the stats on this, the global social commerce market is expected well, was expected to rise in 2023 to $1.3 trillion, up from $894 billion in 2022. So that's a growth rate of 46%. By 2026, it's predicted that the market's going to reach $3 trillion.

Speaker 1: 14:19

That's almost as much as Elon Musk's annual bonus for Tesla, isn't it which he's got to give back?

Speaker 3: 14:26

Well, you stop like an Elon Musk off. We want him on the show.

Speaker 1: 14:28

He's going to go off. Oh yeah, Sorry Right.

Speaker 3: 14:30

And the top social commerce platforms were Facebook at $262 billion. Instagram was then second place with $97 billion, so less than half of that. So Facebook's still the number one platform for social transactions.

Speaker 1: 14:44

I find that surprising. Well, I mean, I suppose it's got the scale, hasn't it? I think we're going to see TikTok really emerging as a key social commerce platform.

Speaker 3: 14:52

Yeah, the TikTok shop.

Speaker 1: 14:53

Is that in the list? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 14:55

TikTok is actually third. So that's it. It's half again. So, even though it's in third place, it's half again of second place at $43.8 billion. Then Pinterest is $27.3 billion and then YouTube is $25 billion. But the point is it is growing massively. So social commerce is the prediction is what's been happening this year in 2023. Will's kind of alluded to this, but we're going to talk a bit about Twitter. But Twitter has to come up in this bit because this did happen in 2023.

Speaker 3: 15:25

Twitter changed its name to X. Elon Musk decided to change it to X and that has happened. All the other things that he's done to the brand. And we dived into this in a great podcast with Neville Hobson, didn't we? So if you haven't listened to the one with Neville Hobson, please go and listen to that because it's fascinating. We dived right into Twitter and what's happened is there's been an 8 million people drop daily active users drop since it's rebranded. So he's got something wrong, but I'll let we'll cover that in a bit more detail later.

Speaker 3: 15:56

Another thing that's happened is that TikTok has become the second most popular search engine. Remember that Google's the first most popular search engine and it owns traditionally the second biggest search engine, which is YouTube. Well, tiktok has now taken that spot. So people are now saying TikTok is a search engine. It's entertainment first, I know, but it is. It's now a search engine and 40% of Generation Z are turning to TikTok or Instagram before performing a traditional Google search. That's the latest statistics. It's still too early to say whether TikTok will eventually replace Google as the most popular search engine, but it's definitely on Google's radar.

Speaker 3: 16:33

Now. Tiktok is becoming a more important source of news, for information news and information for young people, my children included. They both get their news from TikTok. It's quite worrying that the amount of misinformation that's on TikTok and the younger generation are getting their news from there. There's a lot news from this platform. There's a lot of misinformation. If you like discussing misinformation and the threat of misinformation for your brand, check out our podcast with Aunt Cousins that we did a couple of weeks ago, because that was our most popular podcast for ages and it was all about misinformation and controlling. It was interesting, wasn't it?

Speaker 1: 17:07

It was interesting and, I think, for brands might be wondering what does this mean for me when it comes to TikTok being so influential? When it comes to search, I think two things. One is it's a really great way to see your brand in use and how your brand is talked about, isn't it? So if you do a search for your brand, you can see in a really authentic way how people are talking about it, what they like, what they dislike, and the second piece is having that kind of understanding of what your brand presence is like on TikTok, whether that's a branded presence, if you like, or whether that's working with influencers.

Speaker 1: 17:38

You need to start thinking about how your brand is represented on that channel.

Speaker 3: 17:41

Yeah, a lot of brands represent themselves in a much more entertaining way than any other platform.

Speaker 3: 17:45

on TikTok they have a bit of fun on that platform. So that leads us to the third thing that we've noticed, which is a growth in creator-led brands. So creator-led brands are expected to generate $1.3 trillion in revenue by 2025. This represents a significant growth from the $8 billion that they generated in 2019. So there's a massive uplift in this. Creator-led brands thrive on trust, authenticity and direct engagement with their communities. These brands are a powerful force in the marketing world. The average engagement rate for a creator-led brand is 5%, compared to the average engagement rate for a traditional brand of 2%. We've got quite a few clients that we've been doing campaigns with. In the webinar we were showcasing our client's C4 energy and we've done so much work with creators, including a number of athletes and all sorts.

Speaker 1: 18:38

Yeah, absolutely. I mean essentially our approach with C4, which has been hugely successful. Do check them out. We'll put a link in the show notes to their channels. But essentially, the majority of our content is working with content creators who actually tell the brand story through their own unique perspectives. It's a hugely effective way to engage and build the brand.

Speaker 3: 19:02

Okay, so I promised that we'd look at who got it right and who got it wrong. Well, let's take a look at who got it right. Initially, the first example we've been using in our webinar. I don't know if you saw this. We can't, obviously, show this on the show because it's audio and video. I know we're on YouTube, but this is a video campaign. It was launched by the Samaritans with Norwich City Football Club and it was to celebrate if that's a word World Mental Health Day and the campaign was called you Are Not Alone and it was in collaboration with Norwich City Football Club and basically it's a video.

Speaker 3: 19:39

If you haven't seen it. It's a video of two football fans and they're sat next to each other at Norwich and it films two people. They sat together and it goes through the whole season, basically, and they sat next to you. It's five minutes long. It's a really powerful video because one guy looks really, really happy. He's jumping up and down, celebrating. Obviously they're losing, winning, losing, winning. And this other one guy's really animated and talking. The other guy's really quiet, but they shake hands and they hug on goals and things like that, and then right at the end, there's a massive twist and the guy that's really miserable turns. You know, the guy that looks not miserable, the guy that looks depressed, comes back in and sits down and there's an empty seat next to him. And it's the guy that looked really happy. All the way through, it was actually hiding the fact that he was suicidal, so it was really, really impactful. What a campaign Wasn't it? Well, it, was brilliant.

Speaker 1: 20:31

I mean, it shows the. It shows how, essentially, what's a video can then turn into a national news story. You know, they really kind of. They really understood that. And the video was so powerful, the media picked up on it. It became a huge talking point on social media, and that's what the best campaigns should do, isn't it? They should just work across different platforms. And it really became that kind of water cooler moment, didn't it? In the show notes we'll put the link to it. I'm sure you've probably seen it already, or a lot of you will have done, but yeah, it's definitely worth a watch.

Speaker 3: 21:00

And the video has been viewed by over 55 million times. So amazing campaigns. Well done to the Samaritans and Norwich City Football Club. Okay, so another great campaign well, campaign campaigns that got it right was the barbenheimer effect. So you can't have unless you were hidden under a rock in 2023, you must, you can't have missed the Barbie film. Will just wouldn't stop talking about it in the office. He must have gone to see it 10 times, jg.

Speaker 1: 21:26

Big fan, big fan, cw yeah.

Speaker 3: 21:27

Everything that you could have is pink. And then, obviously, the Barbie, the Barbie show, the Barbie movie was really well, really well marked. It was everywhere, wasn't it?

Speaker 1: 21:38

Yeah, I mean, but the beauty of this is the the respective PR teams.

Speaker 3: 21:43

Yeah, and I don't know, they didn't want to have each other, didn't they? For a bit of fun.

Speaker 1: 21:47

Yeah, and I don't. I mean this, I'm not going to pretend. I think this was a kind of you know pre-launch, so I won't have thought about this.

Speaker 3: 21:53

No, it wasn't strategic. I think it just happened.

Speaker 1: 21:55

Yeah, and then but I think the lesson is that I've seen how the two films were being talked about on social yeah. And they really lent into it. And actually the, the movies being juxtaposed together, became greater than the sum of their parts. And you know, if Oppenheimer and Barbie had just been going on their own individual routes, promoting them, I bet they would have had, you know, not a fraction of the of the success that they did have.

Speaker 3: 22:18

What I loved about this, though, is like so, basically, oppenheimer is obviously the story of the creation of the atom bomb, and Barbie is the story of Barbie and is 6% of Oppenheimer's sales. Would you to Barbie's tickets being sold out? So can you imagine thinking, oh yeah, let's go and see Barbie. And then you get there and go Barbie's full Okay, we'll go and see Oppenheimer. So it's just a complete flip round of your your evening's turned. It's been flipped on its head there, hasn't it? And then the reason why we're talking about this we called it the bar bar and Hymer effect is because we spotted something. What was the site? Well, it was agency problems.

Speaker 1: 22:51

Yeah, if anyone's interested in a really funny agency meme site, there's an Insta hand or called agency problems and they jumped on the memes. You know where there's a picture of Margot Robbie and there's a picture of Killian Murphy and yeah, it's things like first round of client feedback picture of Barbie. 10th round of feedback picture of Killian Murphy.

Speaker 3: 23:13

And smoke in a cigarette.

Speaker 1: 23:14

Yeah, and it's just absolutely hilarious and yeah, and I think so many brands jumped on the memes, didn't they? And that's what really has made it come alive.

Speaker 3: 23:22

Right the Yigan Yang effect.

Speaker 1: 23:23

It was brilliant.

Speaker 3: 23:24

Yeah, the hype gave Barbie director Greta Gerwig a historic box office debut of $162 million and contributed to the fourth highest growing weekend in US seminar history, so it really did smash it. And then the third and final campaign that got it right was the Heinz and Absolute collaboration, which is brilliant. So I don't know if you didn't see the Heinz and Absolute pasta sauce. First of all, I thought this was a because we do this every year. We do loads of April Fool's joke type promotions, PR stunts that's what we do. We do PR stunts. I thought this is a PR stunt and I think it started as a PR stunt, but it ended up in 50% more sales in pasta sauce. That is insane. What a great stunt.

Speaker 1: 24:11

I mean, the branding looks great, doesn't it? Actually, vodka goes really well with certain foods. Years ago I used to work with Revolution Vodka bars and they did all sorts of kind of experimentation.

Speaker 3: 24:21

Chocolate vodka.

Speaker 1: 24:21

Remember that? Well, they did a vodka burger. They did a vodka chicken pizza. It's actually quite a good they had like a hundred flavours of vodka.

Speaker 3: 24:28

What do?

Speaker 1: 24:28

you mean it was insane yeah.

Speaker 3: 24:29

Since the model Gigi Hadid took a take on Pen Alavodka and that went viral in 2020, an outpour of social users were wanting to try the dish. So the Heinz campaign went live out of home on ads all across London featuring the hashtag absolutely Heinz, which was on the packet. Amazing it looked like well says it does look visually brilliant, and they worked with a range of creators, including nano and micro influencers. The campaign delivered high engagement and awareness, with over 500 million impressions and sales of pasta sauces, as I said, increasing by 50%. That is phenomenal for what is essentially a great social media and PR stunt.

Speaker 1: 25:08

Yeah, I think what's interesting about this which a lot of brands do and I think more brands could do they've tracked what's kind of trending about their brand online and they've obviously spotted something that people respond positively to ie Gigi Hadid creating this recipe and then they've turned it intoa product, and I think more brands should do that. It's brilliant.

Speaker 3: 25:29

Okay, so we've covered what went well. Now let's get into the entertaining stuff.

Speaker 1: 25:32

This is the fuck ups bit. Luckily not ours, other brands.

Speaker 3: 25:35

I mean, we haven't got long enough for ours, okay. So Zara? Okay, sorry to the marketing team at Zara, but Zara get a lot of things right. They've had a few things where stuff's gone wrong. And this Zara campaign, if you didn't see it.

Speaker 3: 25:49

So what it was was a campaign that they had various models stood up in a showcasing various products and there was mannequins on the floor and in the shot with missing limbs, arms, feet, which and it was filmed in their defense. It was filmed in July, which was prior to any outbreaks of war in 2023. But the campaign came out and obviously, israel and Palestine war happened, and it just as the news coverage was happening. The two didn't sit very well together, so it wasn't deliberate from Zara's perspective, but unfortunately it just didn't land correctly on social media and so the Spanish fashion brand was accused of being tone death. Following the launch of the latest campaign, within a few days, zara removed the campaign and issued a statement clarifying that the photos were conceived in July, as I said, prior to the current Israel-Palestine war.

Speaker 3: 26:43

I mean, this is just a. I think this was probably a great campaign, but they just got the timing of it wrong. This is when you've got to really think about what you're putting out. This is. We advise a lot of clients on this, don't we Cause what works today might not work tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 26:58

So if you put a campaign in the bag, I mean it's a little bit like the M&S. Palestinian thing yeah the M&S Burning Christmas hats campaign, and this, in my view, underlines the importance of involving PR people. When you launch a marketing campaign, you know, and the chances are, this marketing campaign was led by marketing but PR who typically have a pretty good handle on what's going on and they've got a pretty good barometer on the current sort of state of public opinion, what's happening in the news agenda they may have spotted this.

Speaker 1: 27:30

So I think that really reiterates the importance of of having that kind of lateral understanding about what's going on in the news agenda.

Speaker 3: 27:37

And to say that he didn't land well is an understatement Cause media intelligence firm Karma reported a sharp decline in brand sentiment for Zara. Negative negativity surged 76.4%, while positivity dwindled to 4%. Prior to the incident they were a negativity was down to 13%. So basically, forward plan, as Will was just saying there. Forward planning is good. It's not just up to marketing design, it's also get get your PR teams involved and make sure you yeah, cause Mark Spenser was a good example as well of something that was just badly timed.

Speaker 3: 28:12

Our second example that we've got here is Nike and the Mary Earps Saga. What did you think of this?

Speaker 1: 28:19

Well, a bit, a bit odd really, from from Nike. I mean, when you talk about the, the sales they. Well, I'll let you explain it, but it was a bit of an own goal. Excuse the pun for Nike. Nice, nice, you like that Smooth?

Speaker 3: 28:32

Can we have a? Can we have a goal celebration in there? Anyway, Mary Earps, England, goalkeeper for the, for the ladies, ladies, England goalkeeper, brilliant sports personality of the year, Nike decided that her goalkeeping kit wasn't going to be produced. This caused her to. This caused Mary to send Bob, basically post something on social media saying that she was hugely disappointed and it was a bit hurtful. Cue social media outcry, people saying why, why can't we buy a kit? Nike back tracks and allegedly closed brackets. And then the Nike made the kit available and it sold out like rapidly overnight. So, yeah, you're right, bit of an own goal. What do you think? Well, where could they have? Where could they have improved?

Speaker 1: 29:17

that. Well, I mean, this transcends marketing and and comes, doesn't it? I mean it's an operational decision. I mean I wonder why they didn't decide to produce the kit and could. Did they fail to see the the kind of support that Mary had, you know, after she was one of the true heroes of the of of the tournament, wasn't she? She was and she's. She's not she's not shared scared.

Speaker 3: 29:37

She's not scared to put ahead of brother Parappa either. She provided a link to the to a petition on changeorg that started calling for Nikes to release the goalkeeper shirt, and it got more than 150,000 signatures. Fair play to her for doing that. And then then then the third and final one. This was this is quite a shocking one. So this is the story of Bud Light. So, if you don't know about this, in April 2023, dylan Milvaney, who's transgender, promoted Bud Light on her social media platforms as part of a planned partnership. Her content received transphobic backlash from consumers and calls for Bud Boycott. So people were calling to to buy, boycott the brand, which is very strange, and this got a botched response from Bud, which was a vague statement from the CEO that failed to hit the mark and offer any support to Dylan at all. It alienated the LGBTQ community and so every so basically, you had people Boycott in the brand from both sides of the argument.

Speaker 3: 30:35

And this has resulted in a drop in revenue for Bud of 15%. That is the world's biggest beer and it went from the US's number one beer to second place. That is a bad day in the office.

Speaker 1: 30:48

I mean, it's hard to imagine how they could have got it more wrong, isn't it? I mean, first of all, working with a trans influencer brilliant, particularly if you're a brand like Bud, which inevitably in the States, has got an awful lot of kind of Trump supporting right wing drinkers, if you think of any drinks brand at all in the States.

Speaker 1: 31:05

So great they're being a bit more progressive. But then there's this total disconnect between what the marketing team are doing and the views of the chief exec and this kind of inability to this. Refusal to back Dylan in any way with this kind of vague cop out statement was a complete clusterfuck really. And they've paid for it, haven't they?

Speaker 3: 31:24

Don't put any punches there. Well, that was great.

Speaker 1: 31:26

So you've heard about what we've got right and wrong in the part one. We've heard about the kind of the other key developments and we've heard about some of those brands that got it so right and so wrong. Now for our part two, we're going to talk about those key trends happening in 2024 that are going to help you stay competitive. So join us for our next episode in a week's time and we are going to reveal what they are.

Speaker 3: 31:48

Yeah, make sure you subscribe to Social Unacceptable and we'll see you next week for part two.

Speaker 2: 31:56

Thank you for listening to Social Unacceptable. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a five star review. Don't forget to follow us on social media on Instagram, tiktok and LinkedIn at ProhibitionPR, and Twitter at SocialEUA. We would love to hear some of your career fuckups so we can share them on the show. For more information on the show, search ProhibitionPR in your search engine and click on podcast. Until next time, please keep pushing the boundaries and embracing the socially unacceptable.