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RIP Coke Blak
You may recall a recent post of ours that discussed the Motrin Moms fiasco where we demonstrated that a blunder in social media, while embarrassing, likely won’t affect your bottom line. I’m still standing by that – but with an amendment: Content marketing and social media screw-ups likely won’t hurt your finances, provided that your product is something people will / already like.
Content marketing and social media can do wonders to promote your services and products – but if your services and products aren’t so hot to begin with, you’re likely out of luck. Once word gets out that what you actually offer – that thing that people are supposed to pay for – is crap, social media (as used by others) can really haunt you.
How so? Let’s look at the now-extinct Coca-Cola BlāK (or, Coca-Cola Blech, to anyone who tried it). If you haven’t had the culinary pleasure of trying Coca-Cola BlāK, just imagine someone melting a tire, some candy corns and a plastic bag of discarded coffee grinds into a vat. Carbonate and bottle the whole lot. Now imagine yourself in a fetal position and wishing for death. That, dear readers, is the Coca-Cola BlāK experience you missed out on.
As usual, Anderson Cooper relays the experience far better than I could. As much as I could swim in Anderson’s dreamy blue eyes all day, you may want to go straight to 1:30 of this video to see the most eloquent reaction to the product one could have:
As you can imagine, the clip got picked up, placed on YouTube and was played thousands of times. Furthermore, even the average jerk like me had the capacity to blog, YouTube or devote a site to the disturbing taste of this “beverage” that we all discovered independently.
Through social media and word of mouth (or word of mouse, if you will) people learned that Coca-Cola BlāK wasn’t worth shelling their dollars over to try – and the product was off the shelves a little over a year after it first appeared in the market. Social media has had the same effect elsewhere (like the movies Bruno and Jennifer’s Body flopping at the box office after early engagers massively panned it online).
Moral of the story: Before you invest in content marketing (or any marketing, really), make sure your product is up to snuff. No amount of clever promotions or social media engagement can save it otherwise. Quality control testing should never be skipped.
