9xb - Creating Online Success

AMERICAN PORK BOARD GOES OVERBOARD

A little known breastfeeding advocacy website has found itself with a much higher profile than it's creator probably ever intended. But it wasn't down to her own marketing efforts - as clever as they were. Her new-found fame stems from the unlikely source of America's Pork Board - the porky equivalent of the UK's milk marketing board. The lessons are salutory.

As a fundraising idea, she created a series of t-shirts with witty slogans such as "you're staring at my baby's lunch". One of them contained a play on a slogan used by The Pork Board: "the other white meat". Her t-shirt simply read: "the other white milk".

Technically, this represent a mild, possible breach of copyright. The area is a slightly grey one in law, because the right to satirise is generally accepted and many advertising campaigns play homage in one way or another to popular slogans or competitor's campaigns.

In this instance, the Pork Board's lawyers decided to come down hard on this infraction, and sent a detailed letter of complaint. The tone was, to put it mildly, threatening (and you can judge for yourself, here).

So far, so normal. But this is the internet. Within hours, the focus of the story moved from being a minor dispute about copyright to a global story of an overbearing organisation taking up legal arms against the little guy.

The T-shirt was removed from sale (total revenue raised: $8) but the real damage was caused to the Pork Board itself and its reputation. Because the story has been played out online, it is unsurprising that bloggers the world over have taken them to task for a perceived heavy-handedness. Instead of protecting their brand, they've probably caused it harm.

Today's Moral?

Contrary to popular wisdom - there is such a thing as bad publicity. Getting the right messages across online has to be done in the right way and observing the new conventions of the internet. In terms of brand building, informality often trumps legality - a fact that the PR department of the Pork Board must now be considering.

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