Personal care brand Nivea last week came under attack from
consumers on social media after it was accused of promoting skin
lightening in its advertisements in West Africa.
Yet
while the negative publicity could now harm its sales for a short
period, it may well gain over time from the raised brand awareness.
The
advertisement features Nigerian model, Omowunmi Akinnifesi: in it, she
is seen applying the lotion which turns her skin lighter and claims that
it made her feel younger, accompanied with a slogan reading visibly
fairer skin.
This led to consumers from across the
region flocking to social media to highlight their disapproval of the
message portrayed in the advertisement.
In such an aggressively competitive industry, brands are bound to monitor their competitor’s moves in the market, in a bid to pull ahead of the other by outdoing its marketing strategies.
In such an aggressively competitive industry, brands are bound to monitor their competitor’s moves in the market, in a bid to pull ahead of the other by outdoing its marketing strategies.
However, Nivea’s controversy comes barely a month after its global competitor Dove also sparked the same outrage globally.
“The
PR saying that all publicity is good publicity is true to an extent
when it comes to growing a brand’s visibility. When a product becomes
the topic of discussion among consumers even those that do not use it,
will be curious to find out what is going on, conducting “extensive”
research on the product growing its brand awareness,” said Stella
Kimani, a brand strategist.
“If it is bad publicity,
yes, it will hurt sales during the period, the company will issue an
apology and when the backlash subsides, if it is an international brand
such as Nivea with different consumer segments globally, it recovers
and, in some instances, even gains new customers due to the publicity it
received.”
In the Dove advertisement, it depicted a
black woman morphing into a white woman. The advertisement showed a
black woman taking off her brown shirt to reveal a white woman, who then
took off her lighter-coloured shirt, revealing a woman of colour in a
slightly darker shirt.
It was criticised for suggesting
that black skin is dirty and white skin is clean, and it was not the
first time that Dove had aired such an insensitive advertisement. In
2011 advertisement it showed a black woman standing in front of a
‘Before’ sign while a white woman stood in front of an ‘After’,
depicting what happens when you use its products.
Both beauty brands issued an apology after the incidents, but the wheel had been set on motion.
In
research on why bad reviews can boost sales, Jonah Berger, a marketing
professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, found that
even terrible publicity can bolster the bottom line of a product.
However, it largely depends on whether or not consumers are already
aware of the product.
Berger
analysed the sales patterns of nearly 250 hardcover works of fiction
reviewed in the New York Times from 2001 to 2003. Good reviews,
increased sales from 32 per cent to 52 per cent. For books by
established authors, negative reviews caused a drop of about 15 per
cent, on average, but for books by relatively unknown authors, bad
reviews caused sales to rise, by an average of 45 per cent.
“The
reason? Our analysis showed that by making consumers aware of a book
they would otherwise not know about, even the harshest review can be a
boon. Time plays a role as well.
In follow-up
experiments in which participants were asked how likely they were to buy
various books, we found that negative reviews hurt well-known authors
regardless of any delay between the review and the purchase decision,”
reported Berger.
“In these studies, negative reviews initially hurt unknown books as well, but the detrimental effect quickly diminished.
“For
purveyors of obscure products that get poor assessments, this is good
news, suggesting that product awareness often lingers after the memory
of the bad evaluation fades.”
- African Laughter
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