Mia Hill Media

Mia Hill – Popular Press

72% of businesses believe their preparedness to combat online firestorms is ‘below average’ (Ethical Corporation, 2012). A great example of an online firestorm is Twitter’s community reaction to the Pepsi #JumpIn campaign with Kendall Jenner (Victor, 2017). In 2017 during the height of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Pepsi thought it was a good idea to release a campaign with Kendall Jenner, a wealthy white model, depicting her ending systemic racism by handing a police officer a Pepsi during a peaceful protest. If only life were that simple.

Naturally, there was a ton of backlash from the campaign, with many Twitter users proclaiming the advertisement was tone deaf (Victor, 2017). People went to Twitter to voice their outrage for the campaign garnering hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets. Even Martin Luther King’s daughter, Bernice King tweeted her disdain writing, “If only daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi.” Accompanied with the tweet was a photo of MLK walking in a peaceful protest that showed police using force to push back him and other demonstrators. The viral tweet received over 265 thousand likes and 143 thousand retweets (Victor, 2017).

Pfeffer’s research article explains how speed and volume are two main factors in creating online firestorms, such as the Pepsi debacle (Pfeffer, Zorbach & Carley, 2014). For example, tweets are continually replaced each time a person refreshes their feed, keeping them up to date on trending subjects, and with the advent of algorithms, more popular tweets can surface to the top. In relation to King’s tweet, she is verified on Twitter and is also a public figure/semi-celebrity. Therefore, she already has a huge Twitter following, which means that her tweet went viral quickly because of the sheer volume of people it could reach. Furthermore, King used #Pepsi in her tweet, which makes her tweet more visible for people who searched #Pepsi to see what people said about the company.

When trying to put out online firestorms, companies should always respond, for it is more detrimental to the company if it ignores complaints (Herhausen, Ludwig, Grewal, Wulf & Schoegel, 2019). Companies also need to respond within minutes to hours for the best chances at mitigating online firestorms (Pfeffer, et al., 2014). Pepsi responded to King’s tweet within two hours from the time she sent her tweet. Yet, Pepsi had already received an extreme amount of backlash that they took down the advertisement before they even had a chance to respond to tweets and try to fix the problem. Therefore, two hours was not a quick enough response time for Pepsi.

Herhausen’s study found that companies should use explanations instead of apologies when dealing with negative eWOM with either high or low-arousal emotions (Herhausen et al., 2019). Pepsi followed suit when it released a statement explaining Pepsi’s reasoning behind the advertisement, saying that “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity” (Victor, 2017). However, consumers were not happy with Pepsi’s response because Pepsi didn’t apologize to its consumers. Instead, Pepsi apologized to Kendall Jenner for putting her in such a bad position (Victor, 2017). When attempting to mitigate customers’ negative eWOM, companies should also use empathy, but Pepsi failed to be empathetic towards people it hurt the most, the black community (Herhausen et al., 2019). In this situation, perhaps Pepsi would have been better off apologizing and explaining to their customers instead of only explaining how it didn’t mean to be insensitive towards the black community.

Ethical Corporation, (2012). “Communications, Campaigns and Social Media”. http://www.events.ethicalcorp. com/documents/Crisis_Comms_Findings.pdf.

Herhausen, D., Ludwig, S., Grewal, D., Wulf, J., & Schoegel, M. (2019). Detecting, Preventing, and Mitigating Online Firestorms in Brand Communities. Journal of Marketing, 83(3), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242918822300

Pfeffer, J., Zorbach, T., & Carley, K. (2014). “Understanding Online Firestorms: Negative Word-of-Mouth Dynamics in Social Media Networks,” Journal of Marketing Communications, 20(1/2), 117–28.

Victor, D. (2017). Pepsi Pulls Ad Accused of Trivializing Black Lives Matter. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/business/kendall-jenner-pepsi-ad.html