The time when Pepsi left a bad taste in our mouths

As an American living abroad, I’m often told by my European colleagues that I’m too quick to label something as being politically incorrect. Spending most of my adult life in San Francisco, a liberal melting pot, it’s in my veins to tread cautiously when it comes to social issues. Brands advertising in the United States should be aware of this sensitivity, something that wasn’t so clear as pointed out by my colleague Ilse Weergang in her blog post ‘Acontroversial Pepsi ad starring Kendall Jenner’. Ilse covers some areas in which Pepsi failed to deliver from a crisis management perspective, but I would like to cover some additional aspects that I also feel could have been optimized.

If only Pepsi had been monitoring the public’s reaction

As a rule of thumb, all large organizations should be monitoring social media to see if a crisis is developing, especially after launching a large national campaign. As public discourse has migrated to social media, it’s crucial for companies to monitor where their customers are discussing opinions [1]. If only Pepsi had been monitoring closely, they may had changed their mind in defending their actions. If this had been the case they would have seen Tweets like this and this and they would have known the defensive route was not the crisis mitigation effort to employ.

Image courtesy of Twitter.com

Pepsi should have addressed the crisis where it was unfolding

It is also quite perplexing to me that Pepsi did not address the situation where the crisis was unfolding, on social media. While Pepsi ultimately did not make the right choice in their crisis mitigation efforts, it would have been nice for the brand to be more vocal on a social outlet. One suggestion I would give would be to have someone in high rank, such as a CEO, to address the issue at the source directly on Twitter. Pepsi’s CEO remained silent for quite some time before making a publicstatement. Research has shown that a CEO’s image on Twitter can influence the brand to the public [2]. If Indra Nooyi, Pepsi’s CEO, had commented immediately on social media it may have bought the company more time in addressing the crisis at hand. She also mentioned that ‘companyis known for diversity’, had she done this quickly on Twitter it may have unfolded differently.

Pepsi should have aligned their strategy with Kendall Jenner

While I’m sure Pepsi has no control over Kendall Jenner’s own PR actions, it was clear that the two teams did very little together in order to manage the crisis. Jenner remained silent even though her name was dragged through the mud along with Pepsi. When Jenner did finally voice her opinion, she took a very different strategy, she took the role of the victim, a strategy used in which organizations remind the public that they are too a victim and not to be blamed [3]. It would be advised to all organizations going forward when working with an influencer, a joint crisis mitigation plan should be developed in case something backfires.

Image courtesy of Buzzfeed

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About the author:

Tyler Pilgrim is a Communication Science Research Master’s student at the University of Amsterdam. Tyler is originally from the United States (No, he didn’t vote for Trump), but has been on this side of the pond since 2015. You can find him on Twitter here: @the.

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References

[1] Sung, M., & Hwang, J. S. (2014). Who drives a crisis? The diffusion of an issue through social networks. Computers in Human Behavior, 36, 246-257.

[2] Tsai, W. S., & Men, L. R. (2016). Social CEOs: The effects of CEOs’ communication styles and parasocial interaction on social networking sites. New Media & Society,19(11), 1848-1867. doi:10.1177/1461444816643922

[3] Coombs, W. T. (2007). Protecting organization reputations during a crisis: The development and application of situational crisis communication theory. Corporate reputation review, 10(3), 163-176.