Good social campaign meets poor brand stewardship
Bea Kelleher, OgilvyOne
Thanks to Suzanne Delaney who passed this on to me about the competition to rename Vegemite. Harvesting ideas through social media and engaging customers in the outcome as a principal is well established and generally good. However, you need to take into consideration the wider product audience and cultural context for a brand/product to ensure that the outcome isn’t just dumb.
This was definitely not the case with this following Vegimite story.
The campaign itself was a great idea, and got over 50K entries. But no one sanity checked the result. This can be a weakness of social media campaigns – there needs to be someone who can intervene or resteer if the result is going to be idiotic, too niche, brand damaging or all of the above. Or just someone who can say ‘this is just stupid so we’re not going with it or limit the distribution/lifetime of the result’.
