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The Keurig Effect

HansMustermann

Penultimate Amazing
HansMustermann
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Mar 2, 2009
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Now before I start, people have used this name before and after for all sorts of unrelated issues, so more correctly one could say it's ONE of the Keurig effects. Namely the marketing one.

So in 2017, Keurig (a manufacturer of coffee machines among other things) decided to pull their advertisments from Sean Hannity's Fox News show, not just for his general personality, but over his coverage of the rape of a 14 year old. Coming at a time when many people were already boycotting Keurig over their non-biodegradable coffee cups, or the "pods" for their coffee machines which had the same issue, basically someone in their PR department decided that their corporate image can't take any more controversy and distanced themselves from one source of controversy.

Note that Keurig didn't really become some leftist company over night or anything. They still weren't doing anything about their biodegradable coffee cups or pods or anything. And AFAIK even about Hannity they didn't actually go on record to say that he's wrong or anything. They just cancelled their advertisments.

And what happened next was a publicity boost that nobody expected. A bunch of idiots were flooding Twitter and YouTube to post photos and videos of them smashing up their Keurig coffee machine.

And Keurig's sales, which had been continuously falling since 2014, suddenly spiked.

Millions of people who hadn't even heard the name Keurig before, now couldn't go anywhere online without being constantly reminded that (A) they make coffee machines, and that (B) they must be pretty good machines, if all these ultra-conservative types had had one, and their ONLY complaint about it was the lack of advertisment money for Hannity. It was more exposure and in fact downright advertisment in just the first week than Keurig's marketing budget would have gotten them in a whole year.

Better yet, one might suspect that SOME of the lemmings queueing up to show that they too are smashing a Keurig coffee machine, just like the rest of the brainless bleating herd, may have just bought a new one just to smash it.

And other companies' marketing departments were starting to take notice too.

If you ever wonder what was with the Gillette and Nike ads that provoked a similar reaction, and similar spikes in sales, yeah, that's what. Again, neither company had actually become any more environmentally friendly, or less using sweatshops in poor countries, or anything. Or Gillette may have been ok with being less stereotypical about genders in one ad, but they sure as f-word weren't cancelling their 'pink tax' for their products aimed at women.

But that didn't matter. What mattered was that thousands of idiots who probably didn't even see the actual ad when it aired, were looking for the next thing to be offended about, were informed by others that there's something they may want to be offended about, had a look, and were dutifully offended. And proceeded to manifest that offense by providing the company they were offended by with unprecedented levels of exposure.


So anyway, why am I saying all this? Well, because it seems to me like idiots on both sides of each issue are currently embattled over exactly that, except it's about other products. For example, movies.

If you ever thought that a multi-billion dollar international corporation is willing to make a loss and ruin their brand just to promote some woke idea (*cough*"the force is female"*cough*), and that made them either your heroes or your villains to fight for or against on the interwebs, congrats, you too might be the kind of useful idiot they hoped you'd be. In reality they were most likely hoping you'd dutifully take to the interwebs to provide them with more exposure. Like thousands dutifully did.

And if you just idly wondered "what were they thinking?" well, now you have a reasonable guess at that.

Of course, the major difference is that Keurig, Gillette or Nike weren't actually changing their actual product to create a controversy. People flocking to YouTube or Twitter to bash Keurig (quite literally, bash; they were smashing their coffee machines) weren't actually saying that Keurig coffee machines sucked. Quite the contrary, obviously all of them had seen no reason to replace theirs before being offended by the company. Anyone who didn't care whether they not they supported Hannity could only take away the conclusion that their coffee machines at the very least worked well enough.

In the case of several recent movies, well, that was a different story.

Will it work as well for them as it did for Keurig? We shall live and see.
 
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May have happened that way in the past, once; may even happen one more time -- as you say, we'll see -- but this seems too, I don't know, random, for a company to actually base strategy on, doesn't it? For all you know this might have the exact opposite effect, mightn't it? So unless you're already in dire straits for other extraneous reasons, or perhaps you're so fledgling so tiny that you're willing to stake all on a throw of the dice (win big, vs lose small, because all you are is small), I don't see that this kind of desperate gamble makes sense as conscious deliberate strategy, not for a 'serious' company or brand.

But of course, if they're doing it, they're doing it, and who am I to argue with facts? I guess what I'm driving at is, do we know that this Keurig effect thing is, now, for that matter ever, deliberately (attempted to be) orchestrated, or are we only guessing?
 
HansMustermann said:
And if you just idly wondered "what were they thinking?" well, now you have a reasonable guess at that.
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No, what they had done is conflated twitter noise for customer feedback.

I was one of the people who stopped buying Gillette products. It wasn't the advertising per se, but their reaction to people calling them out on their mistake. I just want shaving products, I don't need to make a political statement with it. So I went with Harry's and haven't looked back. But, of course, now we are living in a world where I don't have to go into the office, I'm not shaving but once a month.

I don't consider the political message I make when I buy consumer products. I doubt I'm alone in this thinking. I think it's like what is happening in the comic book industry. The people who are complaining would never buy the books in the first place, even if the changes they are demanding go into place. Happened in the computer gaming space too.
 
I guess the opposite effect would be the MyPillow effect.

MyPillow is a marginal product that has become popular because it's one of the few advertisers buying ad space on Tucker Carlon's White Nationalist Power Hour every night, despite all other advertisers fleeing like it's radioactive.
 
@Chanakya
Well, it certainly wasn't intentional when it happened to Keurig. As I was saying, they were already having other controversies on their plate, and actually wanted to distance themselves from one, not create a new one. It was as much to their surprise as to anyone else's when one more controversy actually created a spike in sales.

Whether other companies are doing it intentionally, well, I doubt any company will come out and say "we just wanted to troll idiots for exposure." Your PR guys AND your legal department would have an aneurism at the very thought of it.

But I think you can take an educated guess, basically. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might just be one. If you don't see any changes of more substance to indicate some company actually being any more "woke" or whatever, and it's just some statements that were 100% predictable to cause a crap-storm on the Internet, and did cause one, well... it may have been intentional.

Not the least because, as I was saying in the previous paragraphs, these kinds of things are pretty mandatory to run past the PR and legal departments. If a 6 year old could have predicted it would cause a crap-storm, so could these guys. It's their job. If it got through anyway, someone probably did predict the crap-storm and thought it wasn't a bad thing.
 
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Leftus said:
No, what they had done is conflated twitter noise for customer feedback.
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I never said they wanted customer feedback. They wanted exposure, which is a completely different thing.

It's flowing in the completely opposite direction, for a start. Customer feedback is information flow from you to them. Publicity is information flow to you, and if not from them, at the very least about them.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I guess the opposite effect would be the MyPillow effect.

MyPillow is a marginal product that has become popular because it's one of the few advertisers buying ad space on Tucker Carlon's White Nationalist Power Hour every night, despite all other advertisers fleeing like it's radioactive.
Click to expand...

I haven't studied that particular product, but from what you write it doesn't necessarily have to be the opposite. It can be just the same effect. At the bottom of it, the Keurig effect is just trolling some group so they do your publicity for you. I don't think trolling the left-wingers to make people remember your product name is any different from trolling the right-wingers.
 
I'll never understand advertising and marketing. To the best of my knowledge, I've only responded negatively to an ad and become less inclined to buy the product. With the possible exception of product placement, which I did respond to when younger.

Keurig, for instance. I tried one at a friend's house, and thought it made abysmal coffee flavored water. The ads or news stories or whatever have no influence on my thinking about the product. For all the talk of 'advertising does this, exposure does that', I don't see why. It carries the assumption that people are remarkably helpless to the power of suggestion, and infinitely malleable. A bunch of economic Manchurian Candidates. I would hope normal people weren't.

*looks at sales data*

*sighs*
 
Well, that's kinda the point. Everyone will tell you that they aren't influenced at all by marketing or PR campaigns -- and in all fairness, some people probably aren't; I'm not calling out anyone in particular -- but when you look at sales data, it must have SOME effect on SOMEONE, right?
 
HansMustermann said:
I never said they wanted customer feedback. They wanted exposure, which is a completely different thing.

It's flowing in the completely opposite direction, for a start. Customer feedback is information flow from you to them. Publicity is information flow to you, and if not from them, at the very least about them.
Click to expand...

Just because you never said they wanted it, doesn't mean the companies in question didn't take what they though were customers, with their feedback, and ran with it.

They saw the message in what they thought was the cultural zeitgeist, which was nothing more than twitter noise, and ran with it. Without doing any real research with their actual customer base. Oh, look, "toxic masculinity" is on the rise on twitter, we should get ahead of that, without knowing if the people talking about it were customers or potential customers. Turns out they were neither, and 8 billion dollars later and they still haven't learned.

If we have learned anything, exposure doesn't pay the bills.
 
HansMustermann said:
@Chanakya
Well, it certainly wasn't intentional when it happened to Keurig. As I was saying, they were already having other controversies on their plate, and actually wanted to distance themselves from one, not create a new one. It was as much to their surprise as to anyone else's when one more controversy actually created a spike in sales.

Whether other companies are doing it intentionally, well, I doubt any company will come out and say "we just wanted to troll idiots for exposure." Your PR guys AND your legal department would have an aneurism at the very thought of it.

But I think you can take an educated guess, basically. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might just be one. If you don't see any changes of more substance to indicate some company actually being any more "woke" or whatever, and it's just some statements that were 100% predictable to cause a crap-storm on the Internet, and did cause one, well... it may have been intentional.

Not the least because, as I was saying in the previous paragraphs, these kinds of things are pretty mandatory to run past the PR and legal departments. If a 6 year old could have predicted it would cause a crap-storm, so could these guys. It's their job. If it got through anyway, someone probably did predict the crap-storm and thought it wasn't a bad thing.
Click to expand...

Seems a little too conspiracy-theoretical to me.
 
HansMustermann said:
Well, that's kinda the point. Everyone will tell you that they aren't influenced at all by marketing or PR campaigns -- and in all fairness, some people probably aren't; I'm not calling out anyone in particular -- but when you look at sales data, it must have SOME effect on SOMEONE, right?
Click to expand...

That's the part that gives me pause. Are people really that easy to manipulate? Or is it simply getting their name out there as a possible contender for people to check out, then they make decisions normally, and the product stands on its own chops? Or do people actually change their perception of the product?

Prob a derail away from the theme, but it is a long term fascination for me. I'll shut up.
 
Leftus said:
Just because you never said they wanted it, doesn't mean the companies in question didn't take what they though were customers, with their feedback, and ran with it.
Click to expand...

Actually, I'm saying explicitly that they didn't. Every PR and marketing department who watched the thousands of idiots smashing their coffee machines didn't think, "hmm, those are valuable customers and we should take that to heart as valuable input." They just thought, "hmm, free publicity."
 
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Thermal said:
That's the part that gives me pause. Are people really that easy to manipulate? Or is it simply getting their name out there as a possible contender for people to check out, then they make decisions normally, and the product stands on its own chops?
Click to expand...

At least as the theory goes, it's a little from column A, and a little from column B.
 
It's probably relevant context that Keurig didn't do this apropos of nothing.

Starting around at the latest 2016, there were organized attempts to name and shame advertisers that support right wing extremist propaganda, starting with Breitbart. This moved to others like Tucker Carlson and other Fox News personalities.

A popular strategy would be to screencap or clip a short video of these people spouting their white nationalist propaganda, then juxtapose it with the brand's ad, asking publicly if this is what the company supports.

Obviously some appliance company isn't going to want to explain why they think Tucker's views of dirty immigrants ruining our white nation is a good thing to support. That's how you get to a situation where MyPillow accounts for 1/3 of all advertising revenue for a primetime cable show. Nobody wants to touch it, unless they are explicitly trying to cultivate a reactionary brand image to rip off Fox News grandpas.

Was Keurig doing something calculated and proactive in this move, or were they, like many other advertisers, reacting to a campaign of negative PR meant to damage these propagandist outlets?
 
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HansMustermann said:
At least as the theory goes, it's a little from column A, and a little from column B.
Click to expand...

I think it's actually "a little from column A, and a lot from column B."

Where column B is, "Or is it simply getting their name out there as a possible contender for people to check out, then they make decisions normally, and the product stands on its own chops?"

My impression is that we have pretty good data on diminishing returns in political advertising. Candidates have to spend a certain amount to get their name out there and secure a competitive base of votes. But after that, more spending doesn't secure more votes in a linear fashion. Often enough, the biggest spender isn't the winner of the election.*

And the world of commerce is rife with products that got tons of marketing dollars, but still failed miserably on their own chops. New Coke and the Edsel are nigh-canonical examples.

To a certain degree, I think it's the same basic mechanism that makes spam profitable: Get your product in front of enough people, and theres a statistical near-certainty that some of them will buy it no matter how bad it is.

---
*Though, political corruption being endemic, I sometimes wonder how much of that big spending is actual campaign efforts, and how much of it is slush fund transfers to cronies.
 
Well, actually there IS. Just think of having your restaurant in the news for starting a salmonella outbreak again. However, in certain cases the good effects can more than outbalance the bad.
 
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