True Fruits, Gillette, Vorwerk, Mercedes: The ten biggest PR flops

True Fruits, Gillette, Vorwerk, Mercedes The ten biggest PR flops

Ritter Sport provided a good one year with a headline advertising campaign. But there are even more blatant cases from the past few years that have attracted a lot of (not always positive) attention. Our top ten.

Ritter Sport’s “No Chocolate Campaign” is just the tip of the iceberg. Many PR professionals know the procedure from the FF: “You create a sham excitement with which you then instrumentalize the press as an ambassador,” says Uwe Kohrs, Chairman of the GPRA, the association of leading PR and communications agencies. In the attention economy, many brands aim to get people talking in the first place – even at the risk that brands that are actually positively charged become negatively ingrained in the minds of consumers. Here are ten of the most sensational PR flops of recent years.

Case 1: Stricter than the German authorities
The chocolate manufacturer forbade himself to call his new creation “Cacao y Nada” chocolate and conveyed the topic to the public with a large report in the “Bild” newspaper . News agencies and media all over Germany promptly picked up the desired excitement. The crux of the matter: No authority in Germany had ever forbidden Ritter Sport to sweeten chocolate with cocoa sugar – even the Chocolate Ordinance does not exclude this type of sugar. Finally, Federal Minister of Food Julia Klöckner herself declared the creation to be chocolate. This is how a veritable one came about PR whirlwind for a product of which Ritter Sport only put 2300 bars for sale. It’s just a pity: The actual innovation – to use part of the cocoa fruit that has usually been thrown away – was completely lost in the self-created hustle and bustle.

True Fruits: Wie weit darf Provokation gehen?

Racy advertising slogans and mocking comments online made the True Fruits beverage brand an object of hate. Now the makers promise improvement – which says a lot about provocative advertising in the social media age.

Case 2: Slippery Fruits
Actually, the Bonn company True Fruits sells a completely harmless drink – fruit smoothies, filled in environmentally friendly glass bottles. But the three founders keep creating plenty of provocative advertising campaigns based on bananas, oranges and apples. For a juice made from chia seeds, they advertise on posters with the slippery slogan: “Shake if seed jams”. For a black bottle they chose the slogan: “Our black quota” and received criticism.In the summer of 2019 there was a real shitstorm ,

Case 3: Razor burn at Gillette
For decades, the Gillette company focused on nothing but their razor blades. The advertising is old-fashioned to the point of enigmatic – what “the best in man” is supposed to be in connection with facial hair was not revealed to everyone. Then it struck 2019, and Gillette suddenly went new advertising paths in the course of the MeToo debates. In a spot by Australian director Kim Gehrig, the brand denounced stereotypes of masculinity – men whistling at women; Boys who fight and fathers who watch them benevolently: “Boys will be boys.” Many regular customers reacted outraged, razors ended up in the toilet, in a short time the spot was viewed 30 million times on YouTube – two-thirds of the viewers rejected him. One a good six months after the spot was first broadcast, the parent company Procter & Gamble an eight billion dollar write-down on Gillette.
Case 4: Letter salad at

Mattel

The board game Scrabble is certainly one of the best-selling games in Germany. Forming words from randomly distributed letters has its own appeal for many. However, the game manufacturer Mattel completely irritated the Scrabble community in autumn 2018. Then the company announced from one day to the next that Scrabble is supposedly now called “Yolo”. The “Youth Word of the Year” 2012 (!) stands for “You only live once” and was already considered hopelessly embarrassing when it was chosen six years earlier. A few days later, Mattel clarified: The press release was just a calculated joke, the protest was intended to provide cheap PR. Not everyone thought it was funny – the German Council for Public Relations needed no more than four letters for its assessment of the failed fake report: R, Ü, G, E.

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Case 5: Made lemonade out of lemons
The French car manufacturer Citroën apparently found the idea of ​​Scrabble so ingenious that it copied the scam for its 100th birthday: “Zitrön” should be its brand name “from now on in German”. , the brand spread on Twitter and other social media channels in July 2019: “The end of an era”. In the summer slump, the campaign sparked heated discussions on the internet as to whether it was a joke, and even other branded goods companies sympathetically joined in. Ultimately, the German Council for Public Relations decided against a reprimand this time – on the one hand Citroën had solved their stunt faster than Scrabble – on the other hand the council itself probably didn’t want to be considered a fun brake. Case 6: Snow cat on an alleged odyssey
In November 2016, some media from “Spiegel Online” to “Bild” and “FAZ” to NDR had strange things to report. A truck driver had not carted a €200,000 snow groomer from the manufacturer in Baden-Württemberg to the Austrian ski resort of Seefeld, but to Schleswig-Holstein, 800 kilometers away. There, a district of Bad Oldesloe bears the same name. Allegedly it was a mistake, the driver trusted the navigation device too much. Despite skeptical inquiries, the Seefeld Tourist Association stuck to the bizarre story for a few days – until it turned out to be a staged PR gimmick. The German PR Council found that less amusing and then issued a reprimand to the Alpine countries.

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Case 7: Marie Kondo sells odds and ends
The Japanese diva of minimalism became famous worldwide with her call that less is more and guided people with books and TV shows from Tokyo to New York to Germany from their supposed treasures: “Only keep what gives you pleasure” was the mantra. At the end of 2019, however, she opened her own online shop with products such as a natural-hair brush for dusting computer keyboards. The idea behind it is to show her fans which products she enjoys, she explained to the “Wall Street Journal”. The move by the “Queen of Less” triggered global outrage: “Marie Kondo has lost sight of her message – she’s seriously selling a tuning fork and a crystal.” However, the shop survived the indignation – but now Kondo is increasingly selling clothes hangers and boxes and bowls for organization.

Case 8: If you may, throw the diet to the wind
“Fuck the Diet” is actually a very likeable statement. It’s only irritating when it comes from the Du Darfst food brand, of all things, garnished with pictures of happy people skydiving together and eating sausage afterwards. Unilever had the campaign designed by the agency Ogilvy & Mather in 2012. The message, of course, was that you can eat as much as you want of their low-fat products — but the message went straight to the essence of the Du Darrst brand, which thrives on people counting calories and being afraid to put on fat. At that time it was still radical that a family-oriented lifestyle brand brought such juicy swear words to TV: Even the German Language Association complained about the use of language and reprimanded you may. You’re not allowed to do everything.

Case 9: Mercedes SUVs make the summer hotter
Carmaker Mercedes also went completely wrong. In the summer of 2019, he played a rather insensitive tweet for an SUV from the tuning subsidiary AMG and played directly into the hands of the climate protectors organized around Greta Thunberg: “If this summer wasn’t hot enough, the Mercedes-AMG GLA 45 4Matic heats it up up it even further with that glowing finish”. Furthermore: “Fuel consumption 8.5 liters per 100 kilometers and CO2 emissions of 193 grams per kilometer.” As if people with environmental awareness didn’t already hate SUV drivers with fervor. Mercedes Benz excused himself with “irony” – but then at least apologized in full: “Guys, that was really wrong.”

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Case 10: Too little communication is also annoying

While a shitstorm often arises because brands communicate too brashly or thoughtlessly, the opposite sometimes alienates customers even more. The household appliance manufacturer had Vorwerk launched its new Thermomix TM6 model in April 2019, surprisingly secretly, quietly and quietly. The unusual reluctance annoyed many customers. Because many had s I just bought the previous model and now felt massively cheated. Instead of cooking with their kitchen helper, they were cooking on social media – with anger. Because the new machine that was suddenly introduced caused the previous model from 2014 to lose value massively overnight.

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