Total marketing screwup from 3M

Photo by Flickr user Scott Ableman

I’m sure most of you remember the Post-it note Jaguar prank photo that was doing the rounds a few years ago.

Well it turns out that a year later 3M decided to give this whole viral thing a go and contacted the photographer to use the photo in a US-wide campaign they were running. After a bit of back-and-forthing (is that a word?) he told them they could licence the photo for $2,000.

3M stopped emailing him after that and the next he heard of it was when people were commenting on his photo saying congratulations as they saw his photo in Officeworks, Staples, and other places where 3M was running the campaign.

To save themselves $2,000, 3M decided to recreate the photo themselves and try to piggy-back on the fame of the original photo. They’ve also tried to push for social marketing of the campaign, by tying it into Youtube and trying to get consumers to really drive the word of mouth component and send it viral.

Photo by Flickr user Scott Ableman

I’m not a lawyer so I can’t comment on the legality of what 3M have done. I can comment on the stupidity of what they’ve done from a marketing perspective. $2000 is diddly-squat to a company like 3M. This entire marketing campaign is probably over a million dollars…. and the celebration lunch they went for after they launched the campaign probably doubled the original licence fee the photographer was asking for. I’ve been at marketing celebration lunches that have probably cost half my annual salary, so they can’t claim that $2000 was out of their budget.

The incredibly bad PR 3M is copping over this is going to take a long time to get over. Here’s a hint 3M - you can’t try to capitalise on the viral effect of a photograph if you’re going to blatantly rip off the idea and the photographer. The mob will turn on you and eat you alive.

The campaign was probably approved by a corpulent Marketing Director who doesn’t understand online but it’s no excuse. It’s a shame as I always thought of them as an innovative company. They have lost my trust and my brand loyalty - I used to make a point of buying 3M specific post-it notes as I figured they invented them, but now I have no qualms about buying generic sticky-notes.

This post is tagged under: Marketing