There are only three things guaranteed in life: death, taxes, and brands doing ill-advised posts on social media.
The Gap entered into the Brand Fuckup Hall of Fame with this tweet of unity and love, clearly not reading the moment, both in society and on Twitter, two places where comity doesn’t exist. The tweet read: “The one thing we know, is that together, we can move forward.” And it had a blue and red heart. Awwwww.
As the now-deleted tweet and company became a whipping post for folks to take out their anxiety and anger, it paradoxically fulfilled the message of its dumb tweet (and manufactured hoodie where the A doesn’t line up and isn’t actually for sale) by uniting the nation. Or at least social media.
In a statement, the company said:
“The intention of our social media post, that featured a red and blue hoodie, was to show the power of unity. It was just too soon for this message. We remain optimistic that our country will come together to drive positive change for all.”
Gotta love the “too soon” for unity message message. Only in America; only in 2020.
The tweet is the most recent in a long line of Very Bad Brand Tweets followed by an apology, dating back to the pioneer days of social media. Early brand tweets were relatively innocuous, and were almost always blamed on interns.
And then as the social media boom of the early 2010s coincided with the rise of a political environment pushed by the fringes (there’s no coincidence that the Tea Party in 2010 mirrored the growth of Facebook and Twitter, and look where we are now!), brands started to take swings on social, often ending up in articles about Bad Tweets.
One of the earliest instances of Brand Tweets Gone Bad: Kenneth Cole.
In 2011, as the Arab Spring was unfolding, the shoe company put its foot in its mouth with this gem of a tweet. The apology was fast, with Kenneth Cole tweeting:
"Re Egypt tweet: we weren't intending to make light of a serious situation. We understand the sensitivity of this historic moment -KC"
Vulture did a solid rundown last year about the evolution of corporate social media, including some of my favorite bad brand tweets; like the Spaghetti O’s Pearl Harbor tweet and the annual unseemly 9/11 tweets.
Over time, as companies recognized that they couldn’t entrust a multi-billion-dollar brand to the whims of an intern, they hired teams of marketing professionals, ad agencies and lawyers to oversee what gets pushed. For both good and bad.
Yes, there are good brand tweets. Oreo’s Dunk in the Dark and Denny’s “Zoom in on the syrup” immediately come to mind, as do much of the brand-on-brand love affairs that have happened over the last couple of years.
You’d think brands would learn. But alas.
But back to The Gap’s misfire. The clothing company has had several missteps this year, from both an operations and a branding perspective. Operationally, the company, like many retailers, is swaying in the wind due to the pandemic and as tenants in barren malls, announced last month it was closing 350 stores across the country.
In January, the company’s CMO Allegra O’Hare, unexpectedly stepped down after only a year as the chief marketer. Mary Alderete, who was the CMO for Banana Republic, quietly took over in March, and trumpeted her coming out party in the trade press in September.
Perhaps foreshadowing the very bad election tweet, Adweek wrote in September:
While its history provides some reassurance, the crisis has also allowed the brand to wipe the slate clean, so to speak. Rather than being held back by what the brand is accustomed to doing out of habit, the pandemic forced Gap to think in new, creative ways. “It’s really allowed us to have the courage to think differently, be disruptive and not have a backwards view about the way the business should be run,” Alderete said.
Ah, yes. Think differently. Be disruptive. Spend hours on a tweet, reviewed by an army of marketers and lawyers, hit send and watch the engagement roll in.
Another part of that “think(ing) in new, creative ways”: its announced deal in July with presidential candidate Kanye West for a “Yeezy Gap line, in the midst of a national discussion over systemic racism. This kicked up a storm as the company had, in January, announced to much fanfare a collaboration with Telfar Clemens, a Black designer that the New York Times described as “upending old ideas about gender, identity and community.”
Now it looked as though the Gap, deep in financial trouble after the pandemic caused the closing of its stores and the furloughing of most of the North American retail staff; already suffering reputational damage after canceling many of its orders from factories in Bangladesh and elsewhere; being attacked on Instagram by disgruntled customers; and being sued for $66 million in nonpayment of rent by its landlord, Simon Property Group, had dropped one Black creative for a more famous one.
...
It is also the story of a large company in disarray and what seems like an almost complete failure in basic systems and communication. When asked about what happened, a spokeswoman for the Gap emailed, “The Yeezy Gap partnership and the Telfar collab were handled by wholly separate teams and the workstreams didn’t intersect, given organizational and leadership shifts between the timing of both.”
Which is business speak for: Telfar fell through the cracks during a time of corporate upheaval. That is a mistake that is telling in itself.
Perhaps when you go through chief marketing officers as fast as I go through a pint of ice cream, communication falters. And often, a bad tweet is symptomatic of a company that is lost, unsure of itself, juggling too many challenges.
Bad Brand Tweets are now a solidified aspect of the modern marketing world, and the script will remain the same: Post a tweet, get dunked on, apologize, rinse and repeat. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies can just, you know, not tweet.
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The Allman Brothers, “Whipping Post” (Fillmore East version; and could be the best 23 minutes of recorded music...and they were all 24 and 25 years old)
Some interesting links:
For publishers:
ESPN announces hundreds of layoffs (Washington Post)
NYT hits 7 million subscribers as digital revenue rises (NYT)
Gannett posts revenue decline but tops 1 million digital subscriptions in third quarter (USA Today)
For marketers:
Clorox Ups Ad Budget To Prepare For New Virus Wave (MediaPost)
For media criticism:
False news targeting Latinos trails the election (NYT)
For TV ratings:
Election returns averaged 56.9 million viewers (Anthony Crupi)
For platforms:
YouTube refuses to remove a video that appears to violate its policies (CNBC)
A Massive “Stop the Count” Facebook Group Has Ties to Republican Operatives (Mother Jones)
Trump’s Tweeting Isn’t Crazy. It’s Strategic, Typos and All. (NYT)
Some great throwbacks in here, my personal favorite was the FCA Twitter snafu of 2011, posted through their corporate handle "Chrysler Autos" that read "I find it ironic that Detroit is known as #themotorcity and yet no one here knows how to fucking drive" - game changer.