Diet Coke’s PR Hell
Good thing I drink Pepsi because according to Dr. Ralph Walton as pointed out by John McManamy, “Don’t Drink the Diet Coke,” there may be a correlation to depression and bipolar disorder to aspartame - the sweetener used in Diet Coke. What does this have to do with marketing? Well, as Brian Morrissey points out in Dell’s Hearing Test, try typing ‘Diet Coke’ in Google and see what comes up. Two of the top 5 search results are pointing to articles about how Diet Coke is associated to depression. I would hate to be in their PR department right now.
This claim is based off of a single research study that was done 15 years ago and now because a blogger picked up on it it’s resurfaced and is a top search result. It been up there since June 5th and there’s no response from Diet Coke. Are they even listening to the conversations happening on the social web? Do they even know that post is out there and spreading further each day? Maybe they overdosed on Mentos…
My colleague Brian Ellefritz points out that this is great example of why corporations need to be monitoring (and participating) in conversations about their brand. Consumer generated media is not something that can/should be ignored. I think Mark Jarvis, CMO at Dell says it best, “Your home page is Google.” From a B2B perspective we can all learn from Sun’s blogging strategy in how to jump in and join the conversation and ultimately improve the sentiment of what gets communicated online. You can bet that Sun keeps a close eye on what new conversations about their brand emerge from the social web and if this happened to them I can’t imagine they’d go this long without noticing.
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Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
I’m sure they know this is out there and someone in marketing has already crafted a response. They submitted it to their manager who will submit it to their director and they’ll discuss it as one item on the agenda in next month’s staff meeting. Marketing will decide to pass it to PR who will edit the response to make sure that any emotion is removed. PR will then send to legal who will boil it down to the facts and dehumanize it entirely. Legal approves the commentary and then sends it back to PR who tasks someone with posting the response on the blog posts. Months pass, no one remember where the original blog post was and even if they did, they are now afraid to respond because they might just lose their job…. on and on…
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 11:55 am
LaSandra - excellent post. Monitoring conversations isn’t really that difficult to do; and there are SO many tools out there (Radian6, Collective Intellect, Buzz Metrics) and of course the freebie - Google Alert.
@OZ
Haha…you must work for a big company b/c you described it perfectly.
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
As someone who recently gave up Diet Coke, I can tell you that Diet Coke is just about as addictive as cigarettes. I think they’re probably not reacting much to it because they don’t have to because of how deeply people are “engaged” with the product. I have dreams about buying a 12 pack of Diet Coke and drinking the entire thing in one sitting.