Grow Your Business

After a week of suffering the wrath of those offended by the ad campaign kicked off by their Super Bowl ad, Groupon’s CEO, Andrew Mason, is giving up on the campaign. Tuesday he tried to damage control by explaining the intent of the ads as a self-parody.

When that didn’t stop the tidal wave of negativity toward Groupon’s reputation, and in some cases inflamed people to get even more upset, his blog post today said they were cancelling the campaign immediately. Here is his post:

Five days have passed since the Super Bowl, and one thing is clear – our ads offended a lot of people. Tuesday I posted an explanation, but as many of you have pointed out, if an ad requires an explanation, that means it didn’t work.

We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted. We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads (a few may run again tomorrow – pulling ads immediately is sometimes impossible). We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads.

To the charities (for which we expect to net over $500,000) and others that have spoken out on our behalf, we appreciate your support.

To those who were offended, I feel terrible that we made you feel bad. While we’ve always been a little quirky, we certainly aren’t trying to be the kind of company that builds its brand on creating controversy – we think the quality of our product is a much stronger message.

Thanks for taking the time to read,

Andrew

The speed of change in business has never been greater and that means your business reputation can change just as quickly. Instead of defending and explaining his ads on Tuesday, chances are some damage would’ve been mitigated with full blown apology and yanking of the ads immediately following the fall out.

Reaction times have to be swift, sincere and significant with the speed of information exchange. Ultimately they reached the right conclusion, but at what cost?

Can you imagine your every move during a disaster being scrutinized and reported to the world. BP is giving us a vision into the future of business reporting. Is your business ready for the microscope of attention during your worst times? Just looking at the drop in BP stock says the cost of mistakes has significantly gone up.

To prepare for such close scrutiny:

• Manage the news from the beginning by being upfront and forthright with information.

• Throw the kitchen sink at problems. Time is measured in nanoseconds in today’s world.Mistakes and disasters will happen to your organization at some point.

• Be financially ready for the dip in orders and possible stock backlash.

• Expect external finger-pointing while you are still in solution mode. Maintain focus.

• Once the problem is finally solved. Develop a white paper on everything you learned in the process and share it with the rest of your industry as a gesture of commitment to preventing this from happening again. If you don’t do it, someone else will with an edge of blame and contempt. Rebuild your reputation on your own terms with this first step.