When viral goes bad

There's a thousand different ways you can slice how the power of the internet and technology has begun to fundamentally change the relationship between consumers and the market. This past weekend was a prime example of the brave new world at work.

Motrin released its new ad campaign over the weekend and upon going viral, needed to be a customer of its own product as moms blogged, tweeted and launched their own response campaign that created a pain for Johnson and Johnson (the makers of Motrin). The offense that mothers felt and the insensitivity of the ad campaign forced the motrin.com site to be taken down Sunday night (and hasn't been put back up).

A Johnson & Johnson spokeswoman issued  this statement from Kathy Widmer, VP, Marketing at the McNeil unit:

I am the Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare. I have responsibility for the Motrin Brand, and am responding to concerns about recent advertising on our website. I am, myself, a mom of 3 daughters. We certainly did not mean to offend moms through our advertising. Instead, we had intended to demonstrate genuine sympathy and appreciation for all that parents do for their babies. We believe deeply that moms know best and we sincerely apologize for disappointing you. Please know that we take your feedback seriously and will take swift action with regard to this ad. We are in process of removing it from our website. It will take longer, unfortunately, for it to be removed from magazine print as it is currently on newstands and in distribution.

Now the next question would be how many people actually saw this ad or will ever know that this fumble took place? Twitter is still relatively new and used by a small portion of the market and the megaphone for blogs, as powerful as they are, there are still significant amounts of people who aren't part of the blogosphere yet. But what could be powerful (and the potential danger) is the negative word of mouth conversations that could surround the Motrin product.  Time will only tell.

The bigger story here is what's been tried and true for years: The utter lack of understanding that companies have for the market and how to truly speak to the needs of their customers.  It would serve in the best interest of companies to figure out how to effectively craft their marketing messages and get with the times and figure out how to re-tool their marketing strategies - because the internet isn't going anywhere.  The power in the market is shifting and as I've mentioned before. . . if you hate change, you'll like irrelevance even less.