How NOT to Succeed in Today’s Media Landscape

She Must Work Out

At Manning, we spend a lot of time trying to help our clients understand and navigate the rapidly changing media environment. Often times, this means encouraging them to take advantage of the explosion of ‘social media’. (I’m so sick of this term) The internet allows businesses and organizations to communicate in ways never before possible and to interact directly with their users, customers, etc. The benefits of this should be obvious. But convincing a business to throw out generations of conventional wisdom in favor of new models of customer service, marketing and PR can be an uphill battle.

To succeed in the post-www marketplace, businesses need to conform to the customer expectations that the internet has created. Honesty, transparency and customer service are a bigger part of the picture than ever before. Customers now use the web to research, compare prices, complain, recommend, review, suggest and purchase with lightning speed. A business does not have to embrace this change to succeed, but they certainly have to accept it.

Companies who continue to believe that they can control their brand will risk being replaced by those who know that the secret is to manage the brand. The internet has given people the power to research and discuss products and services ad nauseum before making purchases. So as a business, you might as well accept that people will be talking about you. And if you don’t like what they’re saying, the answer is not censorship.

Ralph Lauren is currently learning this lesson the hard way. (The very hard way) The company ran an ad featuring a clearly (badly) photo-shopped model. The blog photoshop disasters picked up the image and skewered the retouching. High-profile blog Boing Boing soon followed.

But having ads picked apart for unintentional comedy gold is far from a rare occurrence. Ralph Lauren’s huge mistake was deciding to attempt a cover-up. The fashion giant’s legal department contacted the blogs to demand that their ad be taken down. Boing Boing pointed out the fact that RL had no legal recourse and flatly refused. They followed up with a post exposing RL’s legal efforts. The post, in turn, generated a ton of traffic and plenty of negative publicity around the web.

Not content to let the issue run its course, RL then contacted the blogs’ ISPs to demand a forcible removal of the content. The ISPs rightly refused, and bloggers responded with even more vitriol. At this point, the story began spreading like wildfire. It was no longer just photoshop and fashion geeks having a good laugh. People everywhere were reacting negatively to the brand’s bullying.

And today, in typical Johnny-come-lately fashion, the mainstream media finally got involved– signifying a full-blown PR crisis. The Today show aired a piece about the story bringing it to even the least internet savvy. But the kicker was an interview with the model in the ad. She dropped the bombshell that she had actually since been fired by Ralph Lauren for being ‘overweight’.

The rapid turnover of content on the internet means that even the biggest memes lose steam pretty quickly. Had Ralph Lauren been content to let this thing run its course, they would have been fine. But their need to control their brand with an iron fist has led to one of the biggest PR embarrassments in recent memory.

The company should have been more engaged in the discussion. When they saw the story gaining steam, they should have issued a simple statement admitting poor judgment and promising to monitor their advertising more carefully. Then they should have made peace with the situation, and let it run its course.

Hopefully PR snafus like this will lead to an increased awareness of the do’s and don’ts of the current media landscape.