February's Top 5 brand crises on Twitter

March 2 2016

By @G_Parsons33

Published in Crisis

Time for this month’s crisis round up! Twitter gave a fair few brands a hard time in February, so we looked back on the month’s top social media disasters.

1 – House of Fraser confuses fans with #Emojinal campaign

House of Fraser left us all feeling a little bewildered when they launched their Valentine’s Day campaign using the #Emojinal hashtag. The luxury brand confused fans by posting tweets that were very off-kilter with the brand’s usual tone:

What happened on Twitter?

The strange posts continued to appear, leaving House of Fraser’s followers wondering what was going on. The campaign racked up 3,965 tweets on the first day alone, but few were complimentary:

Even competitor @ASOS mocked House Of Fraser’s baffling campaign on Twitter, by posting “U OK hun?”. The message has since been deleted.

A closer look at the top expressions used in tweets about #Emojinal reveals that people were not impressed: “spectacular fail”, “terrible social media campaign”, “strange new campaign” and “ridicule” all stand out in the word cloud.

The top expressions used in tweets about House Of Fraser's #Emojinal campaign

What it means for the brand

So was #Emojinal a colossal #fail or not?

It’s actually difficult to tell if the campaign was a carefully planned publicity stunt or an attempt at a more contemporary tone gone wrong. Both the timing (a Valentine’s Day campaign two weeks early?) and the inconsistent tone were strange.

House of Fraser certainly did their best to make it all seem to be part of the plan by posting tweets such as the ones below:

House of Fraser has now gone back to their usual high-class tone, and other than a little lingering embarrassment, #Emojinal doesn’t seem to have done any true damage to the brand’s reputation.

2 - Red Lobster’s missed celebrity endorsement opportunity

Restaurant chain Red Lobster was a laughing stock on social media this month after they were presented with the golden opportunity of an endorsement from music superstar Beyoncé…and failed to notice.

The singer mentioned the brand in the lyrics of her song “Formation”, which was released on Saturday February 6th, just before her appearance at the Super Bowl halftime show. Twitter waited impatiently for a witty response from Red Lobster, but it took them eight hours to respond.

What happened on Twitter?

The first tweets about Beyoncé’s Red Lobster shout-out started to appear on Twitter at around 9 pm, and within 24 hours, 219,185 tweets had been posted. In the first hour alone, 19,205 people had tweeted about the topic, requesting a response from the brand:

Red Lobster did eventually acknowledge the endorsement eight hours later, but with a rather weak tweet that left fans far from satisfied:

The brand was heavily criticised for obviously not having system in place to alert them of such situations, and for the poor performance of their social media team.

What it means for the brand

Although this incident was most certainly damaging for Red Lobster’s image in terms of its social media management skills, it wasn’t all bad news for the brand.

Red Lobster may have missed the boat in terms of formulating a timely response to the shout-out, but it still attracted huge amounts of publicity, completely free of charge. Add to that the fact that all this attention was obtained during the Super Bowl, a time when brands spend millions to get themselves noticed, and it was still a huge win for Red Lobster.

We used the Visibrain Quick Trends feature to compare Twitter activity around Red Lobster compared to that of the Doritos and Mountain Dew brands whose ads were among the most popular at the Super Bowl. Below, we can see that tweet volumes for Red Lobster held their own against those of the paid advertisers:

A graph comparing tweet volumes for Red Lobster with other brands who paid to advertise at the Super Bowl

Red Lobster also claim to have experienced the “Beyoncé effect”: a spike of 33% in sales following the endorsement.

You can read our full analysis of the Red Lobster case here.

3 - VTech denies responsibility for hacked data with new T&C’s

Toy manufacturer VTech enraged customers this February by surreptitiously changing the T&C’s for its connected toys following a cyberattack. The overhaul happened after the company lost the data of thousands of children in a hack: they now state that the company denies all accountability for any future theft of data, stating that it is the parents’ “full responsibility”.

What happened on Twitter?

Twitter was understandably outraged by VTech’s attitude towards cybersecurity for the children using its products: there were 5,818 tweets posted about the topic last month:

An overview graph of tweet volumes around VTech's new terms and conditions

The posts speak for themselves:

What it means for the brand

This has been a damaging blow to VTech’s reputation, with customers threatening to boycott their products. The brand has not commented via their Twitter account and is refusing to back down over the new T&Cs, in spite of widespread criticism, including from public bodies. The debate is still ongoing, so watch this space.

4 - Starbucks revamps its Rewards program

Starbucks angered many of its customers last month with the announcement that they were changing their loyalty program. The overhaul means that the brand will now be rewarding customers based on the amount they spend, not on the number of times they visit a store. It also means that customers will need to accumulate a lot more points to earn a free drink.

What happened on Twitter?

Twitter was in uproar: 34,732 tweets were posted about the new program between February 22nd and February 25th. Interestingly, 69% of these tweets were originals, which shows that people were taking the time to voice their own opinions on the topic, not just retweeting other’s posts.

Customers felt cheated over how much more they would have to spend to earn a reward on the new system, and didn’t hesitate to let Starbucks know:

A closer look at the most commonly used hashtags in tweets about the overhaul shows us just how unhappy people were: #starflation, #corporategreed, #boycottstarbucks, #starbucksfail, #badcall and #ripoff all feature in the cloud below:

The top hashtags used in tweets about Starbuck's loyalty program overhaul

Competing brand Dunkin Donuts also gets mentioned in hundreds of tweets.

What it means for the brand

In total, there were over 40,000 tweets about Starbuck’s new reward system posted last month: the highest-impact of which were all negative comments. This may seem like really bad news, but if we take Starbuck’s overall following into account (11.7 million followers for the @Starbucks account alone), the negative backlash probably isn’t going to be too damaging to the brand.

Starbucks may well leave a few customers feeling short-changed over this one, but they are standing by the changes they have made, insisting that it is what their customers really want.

5- Suit Supply’s sexist ad campaign

Dutch fashion brand Suit Supply came under heavy fire on social media after the launch of a provocative new campaign “Toy Boys”, in which tiny male models are shown with gargantuan, scantily clad women in suggestive poses:

What happened on Twitter?

The campaign sparked an angry response on Twitter: 4,172 tweets about Suit Supply were posted last month.

An overview of tweet volumes around Suit Supply following the release of their new ad campaign

Unsurprisingly, the things that people had to say about the campaign were far from complimentary:

What it means for the brand

Suit Supply made no comment on their Twitter account, but the company did speak up in defence of its campaign, saying that the portrayal of the women in the ads as titans was empowering, not degrading. They have refused to pull the campaign.

It’s no secret that provocative advertising can attract a lot of attention, as Gourmet Burger Kitchen proved with their vegetarian-bashing campaign back in January, and it has certainly worked for Suit Supply this time around. Suit Supply are no strangers to the controversial ad: they have run similarly misogynist campaigns in the past.

However, such campaigns can leave a smear on a company’s reputation: Suit Supply needs to be careful not to permanently tarnish its image by repeatedly playing the sexist card as a shock tactic.

BONUS - BT gets trolled for service outage with #BTDown

As Microsoft was unfortunate enough to find out back in January, Twitter shows no mercy to brands experiencing technical issues with their services. BT was held up to ridicule earlier this month when its internet and broadband service went down across the UK for several hours.

What happened on Twitter?

There were 11,410 tweets using the #BTDown hashtag between 1 pm and 12 am on February 2nd.

An overview of tweet volumes containing the #BTDown hashtag

Initially Twitter users were simply asking BT what was going on, but it didn’t take long for people to start poking fun at the brand for difficulties it was experiencing:

Activity gradually wound down, but even after service was restored, people couldn’t resist having one last dig:

What it means for the brand

The @BTCare account tweeted several times during the outage, including an apology once services were back online:

In this case, there probably wasn’t much BT could have done: the brand just had to grin and bear all of the ridicule and let things wind down on their own.

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Published in Crisis