Hannah Martine’s post “Bourbon blunders: Maker’s Mark’s big branding mistake” got me thinking about other brands that have had advertising “blunders,” and caused a backlash that had to be remedied by the manufacturer. And the first one to come to mind, although it happened between 2010 and 2012, was the fake band from the Freecreditreport.com commercials.
Freecreditreport.com (www.freecreditreport.com) launched a campaign of commercials that aired on television and were available online (featuring a fake band playing fake songs in 2007 (www.free-credit-report-band.com, 2013) that lasted through 2010. In 2010 amidst lawsuits and the idea of having a band tour and play the commercial songs, Freecreditreport.com replaced the band with “a real band” (www.free-credit-report-band.com, 2013). It wasn’t long though, before there was a backlash by consumers demanding that the old band return, which they did in June of 2012 (www.free-credit-report-band.com, 2013). What seems even more bizarre about this is that the original band’s three members are all professional musicians, too (www.free-credit-report-band.com, 2013).
However, consumers creating a backlash that a company fixes isn’t what I find interesting, as we saw in Martine’s post about Maker’s Mark, as well as countless mistakes that have been made throughout the years (New Coke anyone?). What I find interesting is that the Martin Agency of Richmond, VA., (Huffingtonpost.com, 2012) created a campaign to which consumers felt an emotional connection to that overshadowed the product. There were no complaints or backlash regarding Freecreditreport.com only being a free trial, not technically tree (Huffingtonpost.com, 2012), or that the product was faulty.
The Martin Agency may have created a campaign that may have benefited the musicians in the commercials more that Freecreditreport.com as each of the musicians in the commercial have their own bands (www.free-credit-report-band.com, 2013). I’ve been trying to think of another time this has happened, where an advertisement or the message in it became bigger than the product advertised. And at the end of the day, was this really a blunder because now people know the Freecreditreport.com band and as a result the site.
The original band
The replacements
References
Dicker, R. (2012). Original band returns in ads for FreeCreditScore.com. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/experians-freecreditscore-band_n_1574319.html.
Freecreditreport.com. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.free-credit-report-band.com.
Free-credit-report-band.com. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.free-credit-report-band.com.