Back in the early ’90’s in the UK there was a commercial for the soft drink - Tango. This commercial showed that when you drank a can of their soda, a little orange man would run up to you and slap you in the face - “You’ll know when you’ve been Tango’d”

As you may imagine, this spawned a spate of copycat incidents across schoolyards in the UK, with children suffering ear damage as their classmates would sneak up on them, slapping them, or Tango-ing them. Shortly after this, the commercial was banned. Tango later reshot the ad, replacing the slap with a kiss.

Today, I found out that another orange based company - Cheetos - has decided to go a couple of steps beyond the Tango campaign. With their Random Acts of Cheetos commercials they actually encourage people to commit vandalism. i.e. if someone deserves it, throw some cheetos in the laundry with their best whites… for the neat freak you know, coat their keyboard in crumbled cheetos… and so on.

Aside from the lawsuits, do they realize the potential reputation management hit that they could take from this? Already they have people talking about how irresponsible they are being, what about when people actually start doing what they’re told and damage other’s property? Are they prepared for that kind of backlash? Do they have a Reputation Management plan in place? From the looks of it, there’s one heck of an opportunity for any negative press to hit on page 1 for “Cheetos”. Will it happen? Well, it depends on whether the campaign picks up or not, apparently it’s been running for a while now, and so far it has little traction.

Filed under: Reputation Management, Social Marketing on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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