Data on the Motrin Mom outbreak

Jason Alcorn and I took some time and examined the data around the Motrin Mom outbreak last week.  In case you missed it, Motrin put a video ad up on their website that managed to offend some mothers because they claimed it insulted them for wearing their infants.  As a babywearer myself, (and my wife as well), neither of us were offended, but that's neither here nor there.

The driving force of the conflict was mostly people talking on Twitter, which generated news coverage on a slow day, which caused people on Twitter to discuss it more.  The news coverage was what created the momentum, but the discussion on Twitter is what started it and gave journalists something to write about.

Motrin's brand handled this well.  The quick apology made a story that shouldn't have created lots of coverage evaporate quickly.  There are some lessons, big and small, that you can learn.

Apologies are cheap and worth their value
Motrin apologized and the story, which probably shouldn't have had legs in the first place, evaporated.  You barely heard anything in the news 3 days later, except from web pundits like me.  Take a look at this graph of digg.com traffic voting up one of the original Motrin Mom articles.  It rises and falls with the Eastern to Pacific business hours, and then expires.


People go to search when an issue breaks out
If you had any doubt that you need to pay attention to your search engine profile, data like this graph should put that to rest.  On the 16th and 17th, when the story hit the mainstream press, searches on the phrase "motrin" spiked on Google.  Here's a graph of how people's searches on Motrin (and as a baseline, Tylenol and Aspirin) during the time period in question.


Search engine optimization cannot protect you
In a situation like this, you would hope that having scrubbed and push all the bad things out of your Google results would save you, and that over time, it might become problematic if your crisis continues.

During the 48 hours of coverage, we examined Google's search results on the core brand, "Motrin".  We found that although the results did not reflect the conflict, Google was interspersing search results from news items, which most certainly were tainted.  In fact even today a search on Motrin reveals a news story embedded within the top 10.  Though keeping an eye on your Google results is important, you cannot depend on it to be a firewall in a crisis.



Disclosure: Neither Jason nor I work for Motrin or any other J&J health brands.