That’s marketing baby!
But bad publicity is good publicity!
This month we don’t have a specific plug, we just ask that you look into your local animal rescues and donate what you can, whether it be time, money, or resources. Your local animals thank you!
SOURCES: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eLnb1aIS7uQ6SBuI4RzJ5Znvkia4FaMPinHu_LGnYGg/edit?usp=sharing
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
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TRANSCRIPT:
You may have heard the old adage, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” and I’ll admit there is a certain intuitive logic to this statement that kind of makes it seem like it might actually be true.
In marketing and especially publicity, one of the worst things a brand can do is be quiet, because it leads people to think that you’re either unimportant, past your prime or even worse, out of the game entirely.
You see this happen all the time with movie stars, popular musicians and celebrities. Nearly every month, there will be someone who hasn’t been in the limelight for decades who passes away and who prompts the public to remember whatever they were notable for. And inevitably, you’ll hear people confess, “I thought they were already dead, because I haven’t heard about them in years.”
By contrast, the comedy legend Mel Brooks is turning 100 this weekend, because he just had a documentary come out about him last year, he released History of the World Part II in 2023 and he’s been publicly involved with a sequel to his popular 1980s spoof film Spaceballs, the reaction of the public has largely been, “he’s still working hard no matter how old he gets!”
But then, Mel Brooks may be a special case. After all, one of his most classic gags from the 1950s – back when he was in his thirties – was his character called the 2000-Year-Old Man. Being old’s been part of his brand.
But speaking of brands, let’s turn our attention to marketing, because there have been a lot of brands announcing bad news lately.
M&M’s has announced they’re phasing out blue and brown M&M’s as they move away from artificial food dyes.
Volkswagen just announced it’s laying off 100,000 workers and may close four factories, and this is just one of many companies that has announced massive layoffs this year and yet still seem to be viable as brands.
Apple just announced that it is raising the prices on its MacBook and iPad due to the cost of chips and memory, and this problem has affected many other technology companies as well, including Valve, which is seeing standoffish reviews of its surprisingly pricey Steam Machine living room PC and game console hybrid.
And Microsoft… ah, Microsoft, they’ve not only announced a $100 price hike on their Xbox consoles, but also has seen its stock price hit a 1-year low due to investor concerns about how much money they’ve been burning on AI.
But all of these companies are still around, and probably will be for awhile. A little bad news isn’t gonna bring them down. It turns out that if you manage bad publicity right, a brand can survive an awful lot. So let’s take a look at what really brings brands down when bad publicity is on the horizon… and how a disciplined approach can save a brand from complete ruin.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Bad publicity can happen very suddenly, and its effects can last for decades. Just down the street from my house, there are two restaurants that have endured a lot of bad publicity. One of them is Jack in the Box, which is part of a national chain that had an e. coli epidemic in 1992 and 1993 that caused 732 people to get very sick and which killed 4 children. The restaurant near my house wasn’t to blame; this all happened in California, Idaho, Washington state and Nevada, and it was due to contaminated meat. My parents refused to take us to Jack in the Box for years after that because they worried that it wasn’t a safe place to eat. And yet over 30 years later, the chain is still around and has a strong safety record, and while there are fewer of them here in St. Louis, you can still find a Jack in the Box restaurant if you really want to.
More recently, at the Longhorn Steakhouse in Fairview Heights, IL, over 150 people reported food poisoning from the Shigella bacteria in September and October of 2024, and dozen even had to be hospitalized. The restaurant is a chain and this particular outbreak was limited to this location. But this wasn’t just a small outbreak – it made national news!
The restaurant temporarily closed for cleaning and retraining the staff, and reopened after being cleared by the Illinois Department of Public Health later that month. Even so, you didn’t see too many people going there when it opened back up.
I passed by it the other night. It was packed! I was really surprised that memories are so short, or perhaps that the desire for eating steak at Longhorn Steakhouse is so high. In either event, the business seems to have weathered the bad news, and I haven’t seen any news suggesting that Longhorn is negatively impacted.
Quite the contrary – the chain just hit $1B in quarterly sales!
Apparently, that’s thanks to TikTok, by the way, because there’s been a lot of chatter on their about Longhorn’s lamb chops. Who knew a steakhouse even served lamb?
But my bigger question is – how did both of these restaurants survive these crises? Because food poisoning is not a trivial thing. Restaurants get shut down all the time for poor sanitation and food handling processes, and they can be held legally responsible for food poisoning if it’s shown that they were negligent in how they prepared or stored food.
I have not seen any specific playbook from Longhorn Steakhouse reported anywhere, but I can deduce from the many articles I’ve read that they made some good choices by immediately cooperating with local officials, keeping their employees away from the media and generally saying as little as possible beyond their narrative that they were shocked by the outbreak and were taking every measure possible to prevent another one from reoccurring. I never heard Longhorn blame anyone or publicly say they were holding anyone accountable. I also have not heard that they’ve admitted any fault or taken any blame, which would certainly have legal consequences.
I’m sure changes happened behind the scenes and some heads rolled as a result of the outbreak, but their public message seemed to be that illness happens, they were taking the situation seriously to prevent it from happening again and that they were going to remain open for business. It’s honestly stunning how a disciplined approach like that can work. I’m sure there are people in the area who refuse to eat there now, but I also know that as the years go by, if there’s not another outbreak, people will gradually forget about it. It’ll be a “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me!” situation.
Their response was almost certainly informed by the Jack in the Box situation 30 years ago. Because the four people who died were children, the family of one of the victims, Riley Detwiler, became the face of the tragedy and soon were at the White House giving a television town hall with President Clinton. The crisis had a huge impact on how meat inspections were done going forward and also prompted the installation of an e.coli surveillance system administered by the CDC. And Jack in the Box not only took a major hit to its stock price and saw sales decreases of up to 30%, but also had to pay out over $50 million to settle over 100 lawsuits.
Jack in the Box also had to spend the latter part of the 1990s rehabbing its image – which it did, with a savvy and popular advertising campaign featuring their fictional executive, “Jack Box,” a man in a suit and tie wearing a giant spherical clown head resembling their classic mascot with a yellow hat, blue dot eyes, conical black nose and red curved smile. The message was not, “hey, we messed up and we’re better now!,” but rather, “that was then, and this is now.”
And this shows a rather savvy understanding that old news and bad news are not the same thing, especially in the United States, where failing is not seen as a disqualification for doing business with brands that you otherwise like. Having your brand name endlessly repeated in the media is actually a positive thing for building brand awareness, and consumer research consistently shows that when consumers are faced with choosing between a brand they don’t know and a brand they do, familiarity is often a major factor in their decision-making.
In fact, what usually takes brands down during crises is not the bad news itself, but their response to it.
Brands that take accountability for their mistakes and take corrective action in compliance with laws and regulations are generally better off than those who ignore the problem, shut down critical voices, antagonize regulators and behave as if they are not concerned about correcting the issue.
And bad press is very uncomfortable to endure, particularly in the era of cancel culture. When you have a crisis happening and it feels like everyone has turned their ire on you, it’s hard to have a disciplined approach of saying, “There was a mistake, we accept the feedback and we’re working with the appropriate authorities to ensure we’re compliant going forward,” which is the general playbook many PR consultants advise because it doesn’t admit fault, doesn’t shame anyone and points to forward progress.
No, what tends to happen instead is that those organizations receiving bad press often respond wildly and unpredictably, feeling a kneejerk need to blame victims, to point fingers and deflect blame onto others, to ignore any hint of criticism and to angrily insist that they are innocent of wrongdoing. And while the public is generally not too attuned to bad news, people do pay attention to bad behavior, and that sort of thing can create an endless amount of interest that won’t go away and which will tarnish your brand permanently.
One contemporary example is a Lego resale chain called Bricks & Minifigs, which has recently been in the public eye. Bricks & Minifigs is not associated with the Lego Group, by the way – they’re independent and based corporately in Utah.
The situation began with a franchise store in Oregon that was selling a private collection of Lego Star Wars sets on consignment. The owners sold their store, and things turned into a much larger debacle when new franchise owners decided to claim those sets for themselves and stiff the collection owner out of the proceeds, which he was planning to use to fund his grandchildren’s college educations.
The collection was valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the collector was able to demonstrate that the new franchise owners were selling his sets by sending in a friend to buy one of them. But the franchise owners and the corporation refused to return the sets or compensate the collector.
The story drew international attention thanks to a Youtuber named Reckless Ben who decided to try to help the situation with a series of absurd stunts that even got the Utah police involved in a manner that reflects well on no one, and the situation is now so out of control due to all its twists and turns that it seems unlikely the Brick & Minifigs brand will ever fully recover from it.
I’ve put everyone’s side of the story in the show notes, and as of yesterday, the situation seems to be cooling down following some unpopular legal action against Reckless Ben.
But to make a long story short, things would have gone a lot more smoothly if lawyers and PR representatives had been consulted early on rather than later when the story spilled over into the court of public opinion.
Bricks & Minifigs now looks to many people like a brand that was happy to steal from a private collector and which was brought to justice by a young Youtuber – and celebrities and prominent voices have also weighed in to call on Bricks & Minifigs to just make things right and give the collector his remaining Lego sets back and compensate him for what they sold. To date, the corporation has done no such thing, and it’s honestly pretty crazy to think that a multi-million dollar retail franchise would squabble with the internet hordes and ruin its brand over a collection that at most is worth about $200,000.
So, what has Bricks & Minifigs done wrong? They weren’t willing to let bad news become old news, and they also weren’t willing to take the disciplined step of correcting the mistake and instituting oversight to prevent it from happening again. They instead added fuel to the fire and created a situation where many would-be customers who love Lego toys will probably skip their stores going forward. And online searches for Bricks & Minifigs are very likely to continue to show the controversy and Reckless Ben’s videos because so many people have engaged with the controversy.
Could Bricks & Minifigs survive and see all these negative mentions of their brand name build awareness of their brand over time? It’s possible, though I think they’re going to have to do a better job than they have.
Because at the end of the day, it’s not bad publicity that brings brands down. It’s consistently bad behavior and a lack of accountability.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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