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The time a small brand I followed tried that "reply to all tweets with a meme" strategy and it blew up in their face...
So there's this indie candle company in Portland called Flick & Wick that had maybe 2,000 followers. The owner, Sarah, thought it'd be a good idea to reply to every negative review with a funny gif to seem relatable. It worked for about a week until someone screenshot a reply where she used a gif of a crying baby on a 1-star review about a candle that smelled like burnt hair. People started digging and found like 30 more examples where the tone was totally off. Now she's got a mob of people calling her out for being snarky and she posted an apology video that's just her crying for 4 minutes. Which side do you land on here - is trying to be funny a good way to humanize your brand, or should businesses just stick to dry, professional responses no matter what?
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elizabethhayes17d ago
Portland's candle scene is weird enough without that kind of drama honestly. @margaret_williams5 you're totally right about knowing your audience, but I think the bigger issue is that Sarah didn't think through how jokes land when the product literally smells like burnt hair. I mean, a crying baby gif on a review that's probably from someone who just wasted 30 bucks is just asking for backlash. Maybe she could have just replied with a simple sorry and a coupon code instead of trying to be the funny girl of indie candles. At this point she's probably better off just deleting that apology video and going back to dry professional replies for a while.
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the_tara17d ago
Oh wow, that's a mess. I think the problem was she forgot that humor only works when people are in on the joke with you, not when they feel like the joke is on them. A crying baby gif on a genuinely bad review is just mean, whether she meant it that way or not. I'm usually on the side of brands being a little more human, but you have to read the room first.
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