Groupon’s Second Apology
Lesson learned?
Readers of my guest post on Brainzooming Tuesday may recall I joined the chorus of those who thought Groupon’s Super Bowl ads were a tremendous backfire. Without rehashing all the details today, I thought I’d mention that on Friday, Groupon issued a second apology on their blog.
Excerpt:
Five days have passed since the Super Bowl, and one thing is clear – our ads offended a lot of people. Tuesday I posted an explanation, but as many of you have pointed out, if an ad requires an explanation, that means it didn’t work.
[…]We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted. We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads (a few may run again tomorrow – pulling ads immediately is sometimes impossible). We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads.
[…]To those who were offended, I feel terrible that we made you feel bad. While we’ve always been a little quirky, we certainly aren’t trying to be the kind of company that builds its brand on creating controversy – we think the quality of our product is a much stronger message.
I say well done on the apology and pulling the ads. Also, they say they have raised a significant amount of money for their charities.
Lesson learned? I’m sure. It’s time to move on.
