Andy Jaeger social media and social change

Queenz boycottz beanz

How could Heinz have made such a critical miscalculation of judgment? Their decision to withdraw an entirely innocent, rather well made and frankly quite humorous advert has filled the media over the course of today. Here it is, by the way...

Now, there could be a number of things going on here.

It is possible that Heinz were genuinely shocked by the complaints about the advert, and, believing that the small number of complainants reflected a much larger silent number of people who'd potentially not buy their products, decided it was safer to withdraw it. That would be spineless, backward and somewhat naive frankly.

Alternatively, this could be slightly more sinister. The video is available on YouTube. The advert is being talked about widely. Heinz is getting huge amounts of publicity out of the argument. The problem is... if that's the case, they've calculated that offending gay consumers and sparking a boycott is a price worth paying to get their product noticed. That, frankly, is more homophobic than the 202 complainants to the ASA.

In unrelated news, research from the US has put Heinz Ketchup at the top of the tree in terms of brand equity, measuring consumers attitudes across six areas: familiarity, quality, purchase consideration, brand expectations, distinctiveness and trust. The potential problem for Heinz is that trust, certainly among gay consumers, has just taken a serious knock. Either they are inept handlers of consumer opinion who refuse to stick to their guns. Or they are expert handlers of consumer opinion who are willing to trade one group's offence off against another's lack of concern. They might have been widely congratulated by the gay community for making a rare advert that normalised, for the general public, a display of affection between two men. Instead, gay consumers are about to turn and walk away.

What a disaster. Henry John Heinz believed that "to do a common thing uncommonly well brings success." I can't help but think that Heinz have managed to do exactly the opposite, doing an uncommon thing uncommonly badly.