It’s a question marketers have been dealing with for decades: how do you handle a celebrity spokesperson who just won’t behave? Solving the issue may not be any more difficult than it was years ago, but the occurrences may be more common. With a general trend toward decreasing privacy in society, there are simply more opportunities for a spokesperson to embarrass himself and the company he represents. Gilbert Gottfried found this out the hard way, after being relieved from his long-running gig as the voice of the Aflac duck because he tweeted insensitive jokes following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It just so happens, according to Stuart Elliot writing in The New York Times, that 75% of Aflac’s revenue comes from the Japanese market.
So how did Aflac react to the public misbehavior of a spokesperson that has been the public identity of the company for more than a decade? Here’s Elliot:
It sounds like the setup for a punch line: A man walks into a room and quacks like a duck, then so does another and another and. …
For about 650 hopefuls in six cities, the premise was no joke. They were auditioning Monday and Tuesday to be the new voice of the duck character in advertisements for the insurer Aflac.
The live auditions — in Atlanta; Austin, Tex.; Chicago; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; and New York — were in addition to 11,200 video and audio auditions accepted on a Web site,quackaflac.com. Executives of Aflac and the Kaplan Thaler Group, the advertising agency that created the duck in 1999, also enlisted Monster.com, the job-search Web site, to help.
And, according to Elliot, these thousands of auditions will–in addition to leading to the next spokesduck–produce hours of material that will be put to good use in “commercials on television or online, in social media like Facebook and for internal meetings.”
This is how you should deal with a public controversy. Aflac admitted the misdeeds of its representative and took decisive action. Then, instead of covering up the issue, the company took to the public in order to find a replacement. Aflac, in this way, took a potentially damaging situation and transformed it into an opportunity to garner a more personal and exciting connection with its customers and fans.
Have you dealt with embarrassing business situation? How have you handled them?
No related posts.
