Crumbgate: A Case Study
An interesting discussion has been taking place in the Twitterverse and the web regarding a local bakery who tried to “garner attention to help us sell more tasty cupcakes“. Well they really got the attention part down, but I have a feeling if you asked owners of Just Crumb, they probably would like to have the last couple of days back. I am not going to go into the all the details of what happened, if you want the blow by blows, check out the following articles: The Gloss, Jezebel, Fatshionista and Ignite.
To summarize quickly, Just Crumb bakery attempted to be hip and cutting edge and adopted the slogan, “So Good It Makes Fat People Cry”. A woman took offense to that slogan and wrote the owners an email. The owners responded insensitively and proceeded to ridicule this woman via Twitter up to and including calling her the dreaded “C” word. This sparked a great deal of attention and right about this time I have a feeling the Crumb owners realized that they were not in Kansas anymore.
They proceeded to throw gasoline on the fire by tweeting, “Things we learned on Tuesday: Apparently we do not have private Twitter accounts anymore. Everything is business. Lesson learned.” (I hear this in my best Lumbergh impression) Yea, unfortunately you did not learn any lessons because no-one cared whether your Twitter account was private or not, they cared about you ridiculing and demeaning another person for reasons unknown. Finally, Crumb posted an apology on their blog which proceeded to get 80 comments of people ripping them a new one before Crumb turned the comments off.
I am not writing this to pile on with everyone else. To be honest, I feel sorry for the Just Crumb owners. I have at times in my life said and written things that I wish I hadn’t. People who are passionate about what they do at times allows that passion to get away from them and we sometimes communicate poorly. I was actually looking at these events more as a case study in PR and social media. I was wondering if I could speak to the owners of the bakery right now, what I would tell them and what could they do today, right now, to help themselves? Here is what I came up with.
You reacted wrong. You need to realize your initial Twitter post about private accounts, huge mistake. You did something wrong, we all do, you needed to man up and admit that you were trying to be edgy and funny, but unfortunately it turned to something highly objectionable.
Stop hiding! You haven’t posted a blog post since Tuesday and you haven’t tweeted since Wednesday. This is the time that you need to be out there communicating with everyone! You need to turn the burner to high. You are going to take some hits, stand up and take them. It is much easier for people to yell and scream at people they do not know or can’t see. It is much harder for folks to yell and scream when you are willing to pull up a seat at the table and engage with them. You might not be able to change everyone’s opinions, but you will receive props for showing up.
Put a face to this issue. I know you just want to crawl away and hide until this is over, but you can’t. Other than the small amount of local folks who know you, no-one knows what you look like. Your website, blog and Twitter accounts don’t have any pictures of either of you. If it was me, I would record a video and post it on YouTube and your blog. Put a face to your names and show your humanity. Show that your real folks just like the people who are angry with you right now. Show in your faces and what you say that you realize you made a mistake and want to sincerely apologize for it. Once again, you are human and we make mistakes. People will forgive if you ask for forgiveness.
The web never forgets. You are waiting for this to blow over and it will. Unfortunately, Google has become the memory of the web. All these blog posts, all the tweets, they will all be indexed by Google and will come up when people do searches for your company as well as your own names for years to come. Knowing this, don’t you want people to see that you reacted the right way to this crisis?
What do you think? What did I forgot, what did I miss? Thoughts?
Yes, this is about Crumb’s marketing/PR reaction, not about the initial incident.
As discussed at Fatshionista, the original customer was ready to close the ‘boycott’ group and move on…before they realized the company had been disparaging them online.
Seems like every business needs a crisis communications plan, for before the crisis happens.
.-= Karl Sakas´s last blog ..David Meerman Scott on why ‘white papers rarely go viral’ =-.
Good recap and great suggestions Cord.
The unfortunate reality is that although some did not like the tagline, it wasn’t anything more than an aggressive stake in the sand on their brand positioning one in which inevitably many people will disagree with. I assume bakeries like any other category of small business needs to be able to differentiate themselves from the competition. Although the line may have appeared insensitive to some i’m sure most people would have just chalked it up to not a business they would support.
But the response of the comment and the impending downward spiral into digging their grave deeper and deeper seems to be just horrible business sense. After I commented on this issue on Twitter this morning, many people responded saying they stopped following @JustCrumb a while back because their tone was not for them. If this situation had not occurred I bet those lost followers would have just remained silent…comfortable in their personal decision to simply unfollow. But now that this issue has become bigger, what were previous silent objectors now feel compelled to explain their dislike.
This long tail effect may do small businesses in. All because of 2 words in a tweet.
Spot on advice from you as usual! I agree with you that they did a poor apology and then hid. I agree with you that we all make mistakes but owning up to them like an adult is what makes a difference.
I’ve watched Crumb’s tweets over the past several months with a bit of apprehension. If you know me I can be a in your face, honest, no BS person. But cursing all the time on Twitter and being a punk ass is not professional. I don’t understand what their goal was in being so renegade and bitter on their Twitter stream.
I also feel bad for them as I met Crumb at the SMBF last year when they first launched. They were very polite and nice to everyone at the event. I tried to give them some business but was not too happy with their pricing and lack of willingness to negotiate a better price. At that point I decided not to do business with them based on price and customer service. After Crumbgate I don’t think I would ever do business nor recommend them to event planners.
I whole-heartedly agree. Most of marketing is an exercise in failing upwards. Yes, they had a very public and very brutal failing. It was a failing all of their own making. Yet the mistake was seeded by a simple thing that every good marketer (and something I see you evangelize over and over) is the fine art of listening.
This woman had a complaint, they failed to listen. This small spark led to their very public flailing and their very public flogging.
Their retreat from social media shows that they’re making the exact same mistake again. They’re no longer listening to their customers, they’re watching, curling up and letting the reaction define their lack of action.
You’re right Cord, they should suck it up, learn from it, engage and emerge better and smarter.
.-= JP´s last blog ..Inflatable Mario Kart Racers: They’re Pretty Cool =-.
Karl, you are so right, no matter how small a company is, a communications plan is needed.
Gregory, great feedback. Absolutely spot on that the issue was not necessarily their aggressive branding, but how they handled themselves when the issue popped up.
Brian, thank you for your kind words. I like you at times was taken aback by some of their tweets. I am no saint, but I think it is possible to effectively get your point across without cursing.
JP, thank you as well. It all starts with listening which a lot of companies are not doing well.
Gentleman as always,thank you for your great thoughts and feedback!
This is why a company, no matter how big or small, needs a brand strategy. You must ensure that everything you communicate falls within a brand personality that resonates with your audience. The fundamental missing ingredient here was understanding the consumer from the get-go. Perhaps edginess and irreverence are not what the target audience would even respond to. A classic small business mistake is to inextricably link the brand with the people behind it. Additionally, as the face of business, our behavior counts whether we are communicating as an individual or a company. I say this as a small business owner myself.
.-= ilinap´s last blog ..5:00 Fridays – Yard o’ Beer =-.
ilinap,
Thanks for your comments. Couldn’t agree more. I hope one of these days we get to meet in person.
Have a great weekend.
I’ve said in a few presentations that people generally use the Internet for 3 things:
1. pornography
2. to look funny pictures of cats
3. complain
Any business owner needs to be ready for criticism and be able to handle it properly. If they had replied with a “we are sorry you were offended” and a “what can we do to make you happy” the result would have been far different. Any business needs to know what to do when dealing with criticism online. What might cause the most damage isn’t the tagline (which has been around for months), but the poor customer service.
(On a side note: The tag line didn’t bother me, I never dealt with @JustCrumb, the muffin I had at SMBF was pretty darn good)
.-= Dan London´s last blog ..Multiple Google AdWords Ads =-.
Cord, I appreciate you putting so much thought into this. I have a bunch of opinions to share on this but I don’t know what to jot down right now. I think there is a bit of a culture war going on in social media and it’s just started to bubble up with the mainstream media latching on and other communities developing their own sense of entitlement and culture. Expectations are as widely varied as there are opinions. But I digress. I’m probably an outliner who over-thinks things. Yeah I curse. (used to be a lot. but then i had kids and i had to invent curse words like Frak) But you’d never know this reading my tweets. That was the mistake. The insult.
Crumb should have ignored the email and kept on with their “campaign” such as it was. More power if that is their image or cred or whatever. Or they could have been social and posted all the hate mail about their campaign and turned their bad-boy/bad-girl rep inside out. I don’t know. Hindsight and all that.
Anyway, I will still eat Crumb muffins or cakes if given the opportunity. Honestly it’s some of the best dang baked goods out there. They use catchy names. It’s not boring. It’s a couple of people with an oven and a passion for baking tasty stuff. Local people, local economy. Not big box store.
Insta-poll: Who here has had sampled the Crumb baked goods? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Has this “incident” changed your actual memory of how good the baked good was? Just wondering…
There, now I’ve gone and written a whole blog post.
See you soon.
.-= Ryan Boyles´s last blog ..Happy National Donut Day, America (Free Donuts!)New Revamped… =-.
Greg, your comments are really making a lot of sense for me. Long tail, invisible audience, network effects. Web2.0 in action! Seriously, you are on the mark.
.-= Ryan Boyles´s last blog ..Happy National Donut Day, America (Free Donuts!)New Revamped… =-.
For the record, I’ve never tried any of Just Crumb’s products. However, I had heard good things about them, and it was always in the back of my mind that I should try them out. That isn’t going to happen anymore.
I’m offended by the original slogan. I’m sorry, I don’t understand how it was trying to be funny. I know several people that are sensitive about their weight and have legitimate health issues that make it difficult for them to lose weight. I understand wanting to make yourself stand out from all the rest of the bakeries, but they are going out of their way to insult potential customers.
Calling the woman a c-word on Twitter is inexcusable. Not only is that one of the worst things you could call a woman, but they actually had to think about it before they tweeted it. It didn’t just slip out during an argument.
Then the apology they issued was a classic “non-apology.” I would feel sorry for them if they at least admitted what they did wrong. Bad customer service has threatened to bring down much larger companies than Just Crumb.
Cord you’re dead on about being present. I only have been sort of following the drama, but from a case study point of view, I’m with you… if you want to be edgy then you have to have the balls to stand up and take the heat.
Earlier today I commented over at Ignite on this subject about how they can do whatever they want with social media – if being a smarmy pain-in-the-ass is their strategy, that’s fine, but they still have to be present.
In an earlier post you mention how SWA stood there after the Kevin Smith incident while people kicked them in the shins for days. Crumb needs to do the same thing. I had compared them to Howard Stern earlier, but Stern certainly never ducked a fight.
I hope they take your advice, because it’s damn good. Not many companies such smart and actionable advice for free
.-= Phil Buckley´s last blog ..Why I Shop at Kerr Drug =-.
Dan, I had no idea looking at pics of cats was so huge. Totally agree, the issue here was not their edgy branding, but their reaction to a user.
Ryan, I am not sure if I totally agree that ignoring potential customers is the best advice, but I understand your point. For the record, I have never tried the bakery and to be honest I don’t know if I would give them my business. I am all in favor of supporting local business, but they need to earn my business.
Ellen, I think we all understand your feelings and have to respect them. I think that is what makes this so interesting. There is no right or wrong, just a lot of opinions.
Phil, great point! I criticized their marketing strategy, but maybe that is what they were going for, but when things got too hot, they ran when they should of stood up and took some hits.
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts!
All eyes are on crumb. They have a great opportunity to make good of a very bad situation. The cake is now in their court.
Exactly. Owning up to the very thing you did and not hide behind semantics is what’s needed here, and your advice about being present made me realize that they still have a chance to clear this up. Great case study, and as a fellow small biz owner I hope they will take your advice…
.-= Akira Morita´s last blog ..Twitter: business or personal? =-.
Too bad this all had to go down this way. The whole thing could have been avoided had those involved been aware of the recent online dust-up involving Nestle’s as described by marketing guru David Churbuck on his blog: http://ow.ly/1ZKVq
I’m wondering if I shouldn’t write and publish some sort of logic tree / response protocol that an individual needs to follow if they have been referred to has having “an artistic temperament” or “thin skinned” anytime in their past?
Dean Peters´s last [type] ..Setting up multiple test sites in XAMPP via virtual sites