November 18th, 2008 by Michelle Moore

If you’ve been under a social marketing rock lately, you might have missed the rise of the Motrin Moms in their tirade against a certain Motrin commercial, which, aside from the slightly sarcastic tone, was a pretty creative ad that specifically targeted a finite market segment, posed a specific problem, and then provided the answer. Isn’t that what ads are supposed to do? In this case, I think Motrin skipped the focus group test.

Let me first state that I am a mom, and a grand-mom, and I’ve got my share of aches and pains and all that. The only part of the commercial I thought was snide was the “I feel like an official mom” part where they flashed up a “Hello, my name is:” sticker. Otherwise, most of the commercial seemed more like a snipe against whomever invented baby carriers, since mom’s still do a lot of the carrying anyway, and now they have these contraptions to deal with. To me, this on par with those old laundry commercials about “ring around the collar” where the onus for the removing the dirty “ring” around the inside of a dirty shirt collar was always on the wife – no one ever told the husband to wash his filthy neck. So what?

In this case, the reverberations against this commercial echoed a long way out. One interpretation of the entire event, posted by Canadian web site Buzz Canuck, sums it up nicely – there have been other social media disasters, but most of those were borne of misbehavior on the part of the company – they deserved the outrage. In this case, we simply have a very well-planned concept that seems not to have been tested at all in the proper circumstances.

Motrin issued an apology but they didn’t really DO anything wrong, other than fail to test the ad against a sampling of semi-web savvy older moms. From what I can tell, from the comments I’ve followed, the most annoyed moms seem to be in their mid- to late-thirties, hold a job outside the home, and don’t really have time for social networking… I can see why that demographic would be missed in focus group test. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the majority of these Motrin Moms didn’t even learn about the “movement” through social media, but through email chains, which is the traditional “grapevine” for that demographic. All it takes is for one or two who know how to interact with social sites to paste in some links and presto, the domino-effect begins… this is exactly how social media networking is supposed to work, right?

On the one hand, it’s impressive that a string of Twitter comments generated a “movement” and elicited an apology from a major vendor. But on the other hand, this advertising instance contained no falsehood, no insult, there is no crime here – so Motrin accidentally offended some thin-skinned people. Those people were able to utilize social media to “mob” a business. For Pete’s sake, some of the complainers are talking about a total Johnson & Johnson boycott!

Is THIS really how we want to utilize our voice? Do we really want companies and businesses to tiptoe around on eggshells lest a certain micro-segment of the audience feel insulted?

I respectfully decline to participate…