The Nutella Incident

The Nutella Incident

We’re investigating how social media can take a naive marketing campaign and turn it on its head!

Over the years dealing with promotional staff, we have seen the good and bad in promotional marketing deals.

The latest flop is Nutella.

This campaign is innocent and initially acted as a ‘thank you’ to its faithful customers, allowing them to go online and put their name on the jars.  If the name fit in with guidelines, then the user got a free jar of Nutella!
The campaign has been relatively successful with the parent company, Ferrero Australia, enjoying the primary reactions, many users taking a selfie with their free jars when they arrived.

But then it happened; like every other social media campaign gone bad. Although it had started well, with fans of the product jumping onto the bandwagon and sharing it with their friends and the company proud that it could make its customers happy, then social media jars started reading:

“Diabetes”

“Allergen”


When the company was set to start up the campaign in Australia, it is understood that the managers received many warnings of Auzzy humour.
It only took one, and then it all came crashing down.
Part of the campaign included attaching the hash tag #mynutella to your jar; this highlighted those users who had taken the campaign seriously and put their real name, but unfortunately also recognised those who had taken the campaign for a ride, by putting words such as ‘Diabetes’ on their label instead.
Thankfully for Nutella, in their terms and conditions, there were a few catches as to whether you can receive your very own label, one being that the name on the jar must be suitable to children and not include obscenities, offensive or inappropriate language.


Other recent flops include, but are not limited to, Woolworths; they felt a serious backlash when they asked users to upload a picture from their war memories to a ‘profile generator’, and stamped the photos with the logo “lest we forget Anzac 1915-2015 … Fresh in our memories” and the Woolworths logo!

This campaign was stopped by a government official, due to the use of the word “Anzac”, which is a protected word and can only be used in line with the Protection of the Word Anzac Act.

We feel that a good way to get around people’s sense of humour is to have promotional staff!
People like talking to people, and if customers are being handed promotional gear that already has ideas on it, like Coca-Cola’s named bottles, then they are less likely to be sabotaged on the internet.

Contact us today for more information on Promotional Staff!