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Mean Tweets Encourage Bad Behavior

6/29/2017

by David Hagenbuch, founder of Mindful Marketing & author of Honorable Influence

It’s painful to repeat these social media putdowns, but there’s a reason: “[Amy Poehler’s face] looks like she survived a nuclear blast.” “Melissa McCarthy is the Madea of white people.”   “Anthony Mackie is probably just angry because he looks like a *#@% Aardvark.” “Gina Davis is a real man’s man.” “If you skinned Larry King & ironed out his leather, you could make enough coats to give 1 to every poor child in America.”

While one might wonder how individuals can be so insensitive as to post these kinds of insults on Twitter, what’s even more incredible is that a national television network curates the cruelty, repackages it, and presents it as comedy. What show does such things? ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live.

For over five years, the show has aired a segment called “Mean Tweets.” Each edition features scathing criticisms that ill-mannered individuals have tweeted about specific celebrities. While simply sharing the verbal abuse would be bad enough, to create more compelling television, producers have each celebrity read his/her own Mean Tweets on camera, heightening the humiliation.

Despite its animosity, the segment has been well-liked, as suggested by both the bit’s longevity and the growing number of special segments, e.g., NFL and NBA players, country music stars, and even a President Obama edition. Several of these spin-offs have garnered tens of millions of views on YouTube. Why have they been so popular? Perhaps for the same reason motorists slow down to checkout a car accident when they know they shouldn’t, yet they can’t keep from looking.

Some may be thinking, "What’s the harm? Many of the tweets are funny because they’re stupid. Plus, celebrities are used to public scrutiny and don’t seem to mind reading the tweets; if they did, they wouldn’t participate. In fact, the celebrities are doing a service by showing how to laugh at criticism rather than let it bother you.”

Those are fair arguments, but those who make them, not to mention the creators of Mean Tweets, are missing the most important point: No one should encourage verbal abuse; yet, that cruelty is the foundation for the Mean Tweets segment.

In most editions of Mean Tweets, the show shares not only heartless posts but the Twitter handles of the mean tweeters, lifting them out of obscurity and giving them an undeserved moment of fame. They are essentially rewarded for comments that most would call “abusive, vulgar or rude.”

In many ways, Mean Tweets is doing exactly the opposite of what most TV networks do when a misguided spectator enters the playing field during a live sporting event: The producers refuse to broadcast the reprobates, denying them any additional recognition of their bad behavior and avoiding encouragement of copycats. Mean Tweets, in contrast, glamorizes the offensive act, suggesting that it’s okay to gain attention by demeaning others.

Granted, most people do not hope for network television coverage of their tweets, but they do want the attention and approval of people in their social networks. Given the wide acceptance of Mean Tweets, many may reason that disparaging others is a path to popularity. That’s exactly the kind of behavior our society can ill afford to encourage.

If one took away the TV cameras and the celebrity cameos and put Mean Tweets in a school setting, it would be called shaming or bullying, which include teasing, name-calling, inappropriate sexual comments, and taunting. According to bullying statistics.org, “Over half of adolescents and teens have been bullied online, and about the same number have engaged in cyber bullying.”

The consequences of bullying are always bad. Children who are bullied are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, health complaints, and decreased academic achievement. And, sometimes the results are fatal, as was the case for 15-year-old Sadie Riggs, a Pennsylvania girl who recently hanged herself. In the obituary, Sadie’s family cited social media bullying for making her feel “worthless” and helping precipitate her suicide.

Should Sadie have read her cyberbullies’ comments in public and learned to laugh at their putdowns? Of course not. The solution to bullying is not to further shame the victim but to stop the bullying. Among other things, that means not making light of abusive language or giving it undeserved exposure.

Ironically, ABC News, which belongs to the same network that airs Mean Tweets, shared a press release about Sadie Rigg’s premature passing. The story recounted her family asking well-wishers to forgo flowers and instead “be kind to one another.” Jimmy Kimmel Live should take that plea to heart and put an end to Mean Tweets and its “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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Scary Good Marketing

6/23/2017

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by David Hagenbuch, founder of Mindful Marketing & author of Honorable Influence

Parents of young children face many challenges as they try to get their kids to do things they don’t want to do, like pick up their toys, take a bath, and go to sleep! Perhaps the biggest battle involves having them eat healthy food, especially vegetables. Is it possible that better vegetable marketing can make this age-old impasse a thing of the past?

When I first saw The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article titled, “How Schools can get Children to Eat their Vegetables,” I was skeptical. Generations of very capable moms and dads have tried for decades to push produce with relatively little success. How could school districts suddenly crack the code?

What’s more, I’ve spoken to groups about the simplistic approaches that some marketers take, trying to sell vegetables to young people. For example, several years ago an alliance of carrot farmers led by Bolthouse Farms spent a couple of million dollars on a marketing initiative aimed at positioning baby carrots as junk food.

The strategy relied heavily on promotion, including over-the-top television commercials and “extreme” packaging, but it did nothing to make the product itself more appealing to young people. Although media embraced the campaign and suggested it was successful in two test markets, several years later I still haven’t come across the rebranded carrots in supermarkets or seen anyone eating them.

Marketing aimed specifically at kids also can be a concern. Compared to adults, children have less developed cognitive skills and more limited life experience, which makes them more susceptible to marketing tactics based on deception, coercion, and manipulation.

So, I started reading the WSJ article about kids and vegetables with more than a little disbelief. The article did a good job, however, highlighting and synthesizing research results that in general found that kids were more likely to eat vegetables when schools employed several specific strategies. I’ve summarized those strategies here and categorized each (in parenthesis) using the traditional 4Pmarketing mix:

1. Putting vegetables at the front of the cafeteria: When children saw vegetables first, they were more likely to take them, as primacy effect would predict. (Place)

2. Offering vegetables as snacks: Another study found that timing mattered in as much as kids were likely to take vegetables when they were the only thing offered as snacks outside of regular meals. (Place)

3. Making food easy to eat: Children, especially those with braces, were more likely to eat fruit that was sliced into pieces, rather than try to eat a whole apple. (Product)

4. Creating an appealing presentation: Like adults, kids ‘eat with their eyes,’ which explains why children took more healthy food when it was placed in colorful bowls instead of in gray industrial tubs. (Product)

5. Using enticing promotion: Similarly, researchers at Cornell found that kids ate more fruits and vegetables when those items were promoted via attractive signage and brands (e.g., an Elmo sticker on an apple). (Promotion)

6. Tracking purchases: Two elementary schools in Chicago used digital technology to track the food kids took from the cafeteria line and what they threw away. As in a business environment, this kind of data proved valuable for deciding which menu items to keep and which to cut. (Product)

7. Hiring professional chefs: A key factor in making food taste good is its preparation. So, it’s not surprising that when experts were brought in either to cook the food or design menus, the vegetables tasted better and kids ate more of them. (Product)

8. Educating about vegetables: For many people, food will not make it into their mouth unless they know what it is. That’s why children who were taught about vegetables in their classrooms or on field trips were more likely to try them. (Promotion)

It’s worth noting that out of the eight strategies just described, two involved putting vegetables where and when it was most convenient for kids to eat them (i.e., Place) and four involved enhancing the vegetables themselves or their presentation (i.e., Product). Meanwhile only two of the strategies involved messaging designed to put a good spin on produce (i.e., Promotion). In contrast, promotion was by far the main focus of the ultimately ineffective baby carrots campaign described above.

So there’s empirical evidence to support that more systematic, serious marketing strategies can be effective in getting kids to eat vegetables, but what about the issue of marketing directly to children? Is it fair to use such tactics to target impressionable young people who are not seasoned consumers?

If that question were asked about many other, less edifying goods and services, the answer would be “no, it’s not right.” A society needs to protect people who might easily be taken advantage of by unscrupulous others. However, it’s hard to imagine anything but good coming from increased vegetable consumption, especially when the ones eating them are growing children.

There’s also a greater societal good here. The United States is suffering an obesity epidemic in which one in three adults is obese and another third is overweight. Meanwhile, about one in five school-age children (6-19 years old) is obese, which represents a threefold increase since 1970.

Of course, obesity poses serious health risks for individuals, e.g., high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers. Aggregated across the population, such sickness presents a great strain on health systems and comes with considerable financial cost. In 2008, the medical costs of obesity were estimated at about $147 billion, while obesity-related absenteeism was believed to be responsible for lost productivity costing between $3.38 billion and $6.38 billion.

Furthermore, there is the social estrangement the comes with being obese. “Overweight and obese individuals are often targets of bias and stigma, and they are vulnerable to negative attitudes in multiple domains of living including places of employment, educational institutions, medical facilities, the mass media, and interpersonal relationships.” Add to this the unfortunate fact that kids are now experiencing body shaming at younger ages than ever.

Are vegetables the cure for obesity? No, but eating more of them and less of other food, especially simple carbohydrates, definitely helps. Likewise, marketing that is effective in getting kids to eat more vegetables is good because it is in the best interest of the children and society on-whole. In short, strategies that work to get young people to pick produce represent “Mindful Marketing.”

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Is Amazon Bribing Buyers?

6/16/2017

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by David Hagenbuch, founder of Mindful Marketing & author of Honorable Influence

There are many different ways to get people to do things, e.g., ask them nicely, argue it’s in their best interest, or just pay them! There’s not necessarily anything wrong with the last option, unless it’s a bribe, which is what a popular news portal has accused Amazon of offering.

Jason Kastrenakes, news editor for the Verge, chose an intriguing title for his June 13, 2017 article about the enormous etailer: “Amazon is now bribing Prime members to avoid credit card fees.” Bribery is a pretty serious indictment to make of anyone, let alone America’s most prolific ecommerce company. In some situations bribery is illegal (e.g., when it involves foreign officials), and in virtually any context it’s considered unethical. So, what exactly is Amazon up to that has invited such a charge?

Amazon has introduced a new payment option called “Prime Reload” that enables Amazon Prime members to earn 2% Amazon rewards credit each time they transfer money from their checking account to their Amazon Gift Card Balance. To process these payments, Amazon requires a U.S. bank account and routing number, which is to be expected. The program also demands a debit card in order to allow Amazon to “fulfill your reload faster.” Users’, then, receive their 2% bonus whenever they reload their Gift Card balance.

Given there’s no such thing as ‘free money,’ especially in the increasingly-competitive retail sector, it’s reasonable to question Amazon’ motives: Why would a super-savvy, profit-minded company like Amazon, suddenly want to giveaway 2% of every purchase? In 2016, Amazon had sales of $135.9 billion, which means if Prime Reload had been used for every purchase, the firm would have forfeited $2.7 billion for the fiscal year. Relinquishing that kind of revenue doesn’t seem financially sound.

Amazon knows, however, what it’s doing. A key part of the company’s strategy is to avoid costly credit card fees, which average between 2.3% and 2.5% for online businesses where the consumer’s credit card is not present. However, given its size and buyer power, Amazon’s effective processing rate is likely lower, so there probably are advantages beyond avoiding credit card fees.

Another benefit Amazon enjoys via Prime Reload is the temporary use of customers’ deposits in their Amazon gift card accounts. Yahoo Finance suggests that Prime Reload “may encourage people to load large lump sums into their Amazon Balance, in order to ensure they never accidentally pay for an item through their debit or credit card directly,” which would cause them to miss-out on the cash-back bonus. Amazon, then, can act like a bank, earning interest income on this “float,” from the time consumers deposit the money until they spend the excess funds.

There’s at least one other advantage likely to accrue to Amazon through Prime Reload. Yahoo Finance predicts that users of the program will be more likely to make impromptu purchases since “they won't have to do the math as to whether the item is something they can afford. Effectively, it feels the same as having a Gift Card balance ready to be used.” Therefore, Prime Reload might ultimately encourage more purchases from Amazon.

So, Prime Reload seems like a wise financial move for Amazon, but what about the original issue: Does the 2% bonus constitute bribery? This question is particularly relevant to the third/last point—the possibility that customers who participate in Prime Reload will end up purchasing more from Amazon.

The short answer is “no,” that’s not bribery. The main reason is that bribery requires three parties and an agent/principal relationship. Perpetrators offer bribes to agents (e.g., employees) with the hope that they will take actions that are probably not in the best interest of their principals (e.g., employers). For instance, someone says to a purchasing agent, “Here’s $1,000, just for you. I hope your company will sign a contract with our firm to buy its new __________.”

The bribe-brandishing supplier may be offering products that are not the best quality or price; however, the purchasing agent might choose them anyway because of the self-enriching incentive. As such, a bribe pits the interest of an agent against that of his/her principal, thereby compromising the agent’s fiduciary responsibility.

In the case of Prime Reload, there are only two parties (the consumer and Amazon), with no agent/principal relationship—the consumer is both agent and principal. As such, the customer is free to negotiate whatever product-price combination best meets their needs. If the consumer wants to accept a special discount or some other deal from the seller, he/she has the authority to do so, owing no accountability to an employer or any other principal.

Does Kastrenakes really believe that Amazon is trying to bribe Amazon Prime members? Probably not. Beyond the heading, he makes no other mention of bribery, and at the end of the article he says, “[Amazon] is both making a savings and passing some of it along to customers.” So, using “bribing” in the title was likely a somewhat misleading attempt to call more attention to the piece.

The bottom-line is that Prime Reload represents a win-win scenario in which both buyer and seller come out ahead. Furthermore, encouraging more people to use debit cards instead of credit cards may also be good, given that 65% of Americans carry a balance on their credit cards that averages $4,717. In sum, Amazon is helping itself by helping others, which is a key foundation for “Mindful Marketing.”

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Marketing Violence

6/9/2017

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by David Hagenbuch, founder of Mindful Marketing & author of Honorable Influence

Do you have keepsakes that remind you of special life experiences, e.g., the playbill from a Broadway musical, the lunchbox you used in elementary school? How about the shirt you wore when you had a big argument with a coworker? Of course, most people want to forget unpleasant incidents like that, but apparently not Major League Baseball (MLB).

Even if you don’t follow professional baseball, you may have heard of the brawl that broke out between the Washington Nationals and the San Francisco Giants this past Memorial Day. The clash occurred in the eighth inning when Giants relief pitcher Hunter Strickland pegged Bryce Harper in the hip with a fastball, which many believe was planned payback for Harper homering twice off Strickland in the 2014 playoffs.

Harper charged the mound, where the pair exchanged a few blows as the benches cleared and players from both teams enveloped the combatants. The altercation earned Harper and Strickland suspensions of four and six games, respectively, as well as fines of undisclosed amounts. So, MLB took a strong stance against fighting—well, not exactly.

A few days after the incident, the jersey that Strickland wore during the ruckus appeared for sale on the league’s dedicated auction website: http://auctions.mlb.com. The site, which is “The Official Online Auction of Major League Baseball,” offers to the highest bidder all matter of baseball memorabilia, ranging from Albert Pujols’s 585th career home run ball, to seats from Wrigley Field. MLB has a painstaking process for ensuring the authenticity of such collectibles, which includes employing an authenticator at every game who affixes a tamper-resistant, serial-number-linked holographic sticker to each item that may have special future value.

Somehow jersey #60 made its way off Strickland, through the authentication process, and onto the auction block. There the shirt quickly began collecting bids, which rose to $1,500, making it “by far the most coveted game-used Giants jersey” from the Memorial Day game. Those competing for the collectible were well aware of what they were after; in fact, “the item listing noted that ‘Strickland was ejected from the game after fighting with Bryce Harper.’”

Meanwhile a representative of MLB Auctions told the Washington Post that proceeds from the jersey’s sale would go to the Giants. The league also listed for sale Strickland’s Memorial Day cap and the shirt that Giants outfielder Michael Morse wore in the same game. Morse ended up on the seven-day concussion disabled list after the game because he hit heads with one of his own teammates, pitcher Jeff Samardzija, during the scuffle.

Successful businesses and businesspeople need to be opportunistic, right? They see chances to make money and they take advantage of them. So, was MLB just following best practices in realizing revenue from the Memorial Day merchandise? No.

The league’s sale of the memorabilia implied acceptance of the fighting. Principled organizations and individuals only market products that they feel are good and right. A firm that sells smartphones believes that the technology benefits its users. Even owners of preschool lemonade stands believe that their customers benefit from their beverages. In contrast, we question the integrity of individuals who sell products that they would never use themselves, although they could.

Some may argue that Strickland’s Memorial Day jersey is just a shirt, and that there’s nothing inherently violent about a piece of clothing. That’s true, but it’s also obvious that the jersey would never have been worth $1,500 aside from its unseemly association. As the seller, MLB intended to capture significant extra value because of the violence.

Our world is rightly enraged by violence that terrorists, abusive spouses, and school bullies act out on innocents. In comparison, major league players pummeling each other on a pitching mound seems less severe because they are highly paid elite athletes and baseball is entertainment, but the brutality is still very real.

As angry as individuals may be, belting someone with a baseball and throttling them with fists aren’t ways rational people resolve differences, and they certainly are not behaviors we want young people to emulate. Yet, selling shirts and other merchandise connected to such incidents legitimizes those actions and even glamorizes the violence.

Granted, there’s gratuitous violence in other sports that occurs even more frequently, e.g., the fighting that’s tolerated and even glorified in ice hockey, which is also problematic. That discussion, however, will need to wait for another blog post.

Fortunately, MLB realized the error of its way and closed the auction a couple of hours before it was scheduled to end. Still, the message had already been sent, and the perceptual damage had been done. Unfortunately, people will pay to partake in violence in various ways, but the organizations that stoop to satisfy such demand are guilty of “Single-Minded Marketing.”

Subscribe to Mindful Matters blog.
Learn more about the Mindful Matrix and Mindful Meter.
Check out Mindful Marketing Ads and Vote your Mind!

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Mean Tweets Encourage Bad Behavior

Scary Good Marketing

Is Amazon Bribing Buyers?

Marketing Violence

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