Good News, Bad News By ROB WALKER The New York Times October 29, 2010
When the Gap unveiled a new logo earlier this month, the reaction was swift, intense and very, very negative. In fact, some people detested the look so much it actually inspired them: somebody set up a Twitter account (@GapLogo) that purported to speak in the unpopular design's voice, and someone else built a site called CrapLogo.me that made it easy to convert any short text into an imitation of the brand's new style. The Gap tried to pivot off the negative buzz by asking the online hate mob for advice, in a sort of "crowd sourcing" gimmick, but that didn't go over well, either. In just four days, the company capitulated and announced that it would not change its logo after all. What's the real impact of such a P.R. misstep? Marketing and business experts constantly warn about the dangers of ending up on the wrong side of public opinion, particularly in the age of social media, when gripes and mockery seem to explode overnight. Then again, there's the old cliché that there's no such thing as bad publicity - better that people are talking about your brand than not, period. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School, was interested in these contradictory views and recently published research in which he and his colleagues Alan T. Sorensen and Scott J. Rasmussen (both of Stanford University) tried to determine which argument wins in the real world. "Can negative publicity actually have a positive effect?" they ask in the article published this month in the journal Marketing Science. "And if so, when?" ... https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/magazine/31fob-consumed-t.html _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
