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Motrin: a tale of two narratives
Posted by Michael Leis on November 17, 2008 at 11:00 AM PDT
If you haven't heard, Motrin has deeply insulted the mommy-blogging community this weekend in a row over the following video:
It's a truly unfortunate case of an agency picking out the wrong part of the narrative to broadcast. In the entire backstory of the relationship between mothers and their babies, Motrin and their agency chose to depict the one aspect of the relationship -- holding your baby in a sling -- that is simply the opposite of painful. As many moms tweeted, these are often times the rarer moments of complete comfort and closeness.
There are many times during the post-partum experience that Motrin is relied upon by moms (and dads). Lots of those moments are too personal to put in an ad, but make up the backstory, the subtext of what would create an effective ad. The problem is, no one wants to see this subtext thrown in their face as context. No one wants to be told by a company that the way they hold their baby is a painful fashion trend: regardless of whether it's true. And nobody -- repeat -- nobody wants the disembodied voice of a brand speaking on their behalf. "It makes me look like an official mom" may go down as one of the most insulting single lines of script ever to be spoken.
Here, it just seems as though no one even bothered to search Google or Twitter or ask anyone who has been a mom or a dad what those moments are; As though it was created in a meeting where everyone thought it was such a fantastic idea that no one wanted to validate it against actual experience: all the approvals were already lined up. Even though the ad had been running for slightly more than a month, when this weekend rolled around, Motrin's messaging came at a time when many people were reconciling the real pain of the financial realities of this holiday season.
Motrin serves as narrative vehicle for the abrupt realities of a downsized Christmas
It is often said that Moms, among many other responsibilities in the household and the greater society, are the CFO. So I wondered how our economic climate may have played a role in this rampant tweet-looting of the Motrin digital brand presence.
It bears out many ideas I've had about
Twitter as narrative form. Searching terms like layoffs, economy, and retail only showed scant reactions to news stories, if any at all. Yet it is a huge concern of most all Americans. In fact, with the awful retail numbers of last week, retailers are ramping up efforts to get shoppers out, making this the first weekend that families have to deal with the reality that this Christmas will be fundamentally different.
In years past, November was a big month for refinancing as families borrowed their way to big-ticket yuletides. This year, and this past weekend in particular, families are facing two very difficult truths: 1) this Christmas will be on a tight budget and 2) The outlook is bleak, financially for many families in almost every sector of the economy.
So I charted the Twitter activity of a few terms at
Twist to see if anything interesting took shape: Motrin and Motrin moms (the tag used to mark tweets about the subject), Shopping, and Starbucks.
I used Shopping and Starbucks as bellwethers to frame the economy, thinking that if people didn't have the money to shop (therefore tweeting about shopping) that they'd be stopping by small-average-purchase places like Starbucks:
You'll see that on Friday, shopping had almost as many tweets as the peak of "Motrin" when it ran hot. What's more, when shopping goes down, the day ends, and Motrin skyrockets. To me it is certainly possible that the target audience comes home with a bad case of shoppers’ remorse, looking hard at what the economy is doing to their Christmas budget, and then sitting down to their computers to vent.
The problem is that as people are sitting at their computers decompressing, trying to figure out how Christmas is going to work this year, it is difficult to express their frustrations without saying it straight out in the Twitter stream. They want to find a way to convey these feelings in a narrative that doesn't say, "This Christmas is going to suck. We have less credit, less cash, and only a few more bi-weekly paychecks to make this work."
So as they sit and think about how to express these difficult truths, Motrin is right there at that moment with an ad that is patronizing and out-of-touch. After years of being told to "Live Richly" this was a weekend of facing hard decisions and realities for affluent families. Being told you need a pain reliever for the products that bring your baby closer to you was just the kerosene in the bottle.
Whether you agree or disagree with me or Motrin or Taxi or moms, as digital marketers, it's important to look at factors outside the brand mentions. Especially in a dynamic platform like Twitter, the tools exist for you to dig beyond the mentions of a brand to understand the larger trends of perceptions and patterns audiences display in their social networking usage. And please, before you go into that creative pitch meeting, check out
search.twitter.com.
You got down this far, what do you think? Let me know by posting a comment here, or
@mleis.