The PR Files is an ongoing series of musings on PR excellency and failure. The PR Files are often fashion focused, but from time to time expect me to go out on a limb. You can view the rest of the series here.
When I heard about the debacle between Simple shoes and a group of fashion bloggers, I had to write about it. The tale is one so ridiculous, and an example of how the blogging community can be so completely misunderstood.
In November, Michelle from Kingdom of Style posted ‘A Simple Tale’ on her blog, telling the story of Michelle and Marie’s confusing experience with Simple shoes. Simple had offered to send the girls some shoes, presumably for review, but they found themselves pulled into something far more complicated.
I recommend reading the full post here, but the gist is that Simple sent the girls one of the shoes they thought they were getting, and another completely random shoe that belonged to someone else. Simple’s idea was that the girls could Tweet about the missing shoes, find one another, and meet up to have coffee and exchange shoes.
The Problems
- The girls don’t Tweet, and had zero interest in starting.
- Geographical limitations prevented them from taking part, should they have been interested.
It’s an example of a marketing initiative that, while cool and creative at first, is executed poorly due to a lack of understanding of its target.
The girls, most importantly, wanted it to be simple. When they were offered the shoes, they weren’t signing up to be involved in such a stunt.
Here’s how we expected it to play out: Simple send shoes, Queen Marie takes photos of herself wearing shoes frolicking in the woods, Queen Marie posts about shoes and you read post. Simple, right?
Not everyone has time to fluff around for free stuff, and in the realm of product reviews simple is almost always better.
It is so important for companies to know who they are dealing with, and surely a little research would have shown relevant locations and who was using Twitter. Perhaps a shoe-swapping tweet up would have been feasible in an area with a high tweeting-blogger population, although I might recommend asking for those who would like to be involved first.
What do you think? How would you react if you were sent a pair of mismatched shoes to your current location?
Comments:
That sounds so confusing, they definitely didn’t handle it right. I think it’s a cute idea, but even if they did tweet about it I still find it kind of hard that they would find each other that way. If I received a pair of mismatched shoes I’d just be so confused!
Very interesting!
If I received a pair of mismatched shoes, I’d hope the shoe purveyor would fix the mix up at his/her expense!
xoxox,
CC
Couture Carrie´s last blog ..Animal Planet
Luana - That’s a good point, it would be hard to find someone else tweeting about missing shoes with no @replies and any sense of direction.
hahahahow retarded…. not so simple after all!
LOL. If somebody sent me mismatched shoes I’d be annoyed, and assume whoever sent them were idiots. Not that the whole shoes meeting up for coffee idea isn’t a fun idea…but yeah, a little communication goes a long way!
Asylum Dolly´s last blog ..Skeledolly likes to rock the party
This is not just a PR nightmare, it is a customer service nightmare, which is even worse
Sometimes is just better to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). It was a fun idea but it failed at execution.
This is a really good post! Some really simple mistakes, which ruined the entire concept. I would be extremely confused if I weren’t first asked to participate. How on earth would the girls know what to do?
Wow, this was f-a-s-c-i-n-a-t-i-n-g!
So much so, that it’s actually a massive shame: it was such a clever and unique concept on behalf of Simple, but you’re right: the success or failure of an idea usually depends on the execution, and in this case, it definitely wasn’t done so in the best way!
love the picture of the oxfords!
Mismatched shoes…definitely not something I’m interested in receiving. I believe that companies need to be more mindful of bloggers - learning more about them (i.e. location, demographic, blog content, etc.) before contacting them for business ventures. A little research goes a long way.
Cafe Fashionista´s last blog ..Smitten Saturday
This is hilarious - and what happens when some marketing guys try to dabble in new media they don’t understand.
Sabine´s last blog ..Corsets, Girls & Horses
i would be like WTF MAN?!?! haha. to me, it’s kind of a lame idea and i would never have been a part of it.
It’s a nice idea but yea a bit confusing…
oh god how confusing!!! maybe if they’d told them from the start what they were doing before they sent the shoes? also, from the companies point of view, a little research never goes astray…interesting idea but badly executed
Ha, that’s funny. And sad. It would have been a cool idea had they sent the other shoe to my sister who I live with. That’s the extent of effort that would warrant. And with the mention of Twitter, I’m going to go follow you
xo, Mel
Wow, PR fail. Def. agree that it appears to be a creative idea at first but not fully conceptualized or carefully thought out prior to execution. I’ll have to read Michelle’s post on it, but were there instructions enclosed about finding the other shoe? Nonetheless, thanks for sharing!xo, becs
I agree… a lot more research should have gone into this before blindly sending off mismatched shoes. I have the feeling many companies don’t bother actually trying to figure out target readers, blog locations and the general concept of a blog before they shoot off an email. They tend to be blinded by rankings, the number of comments and other statistics and think that’s enough to get themselves the necessary exposure. This ’shoe hunt’ would have been a better idea if it had been launched as a competition on their website or been organized with a select few blogs in mind who knew what they were getting themselves into.