Mistaken Mistakes

We all make misteaks. We’re only human. It’s what we choose to do with our blunders that makes them important.

The same can be said for brands. After all, a brand is a human construct. Even with all the protocols, it is only a matter of time before a human error becomes a brand error.

Putting aside big PR nightmares like those being felt by Optus, Medibank, Twitter and FTX at the time of writing, it’s the everyday booboos that can become opportunities. When they are well managed.

For example, this month Pringles launched a billboard campaign across London for their new range of multigrain crisps. Except a typo in the headline announced the “new multi tasty multigran” range. If not for the spelling error, the ad itself was an entirely unremarkable and stock-standard FMCG piece of wallpaper, literally. Bland headline. Uninspiring product shot.

But social media was quick to respond and give it more airtime than it deserved as consumers shared and re-shared pics of the billboard, with commentary taking a pot-shot at the marketing team or making a joke out of “multigran.”

True to the brand’s persona, Pringles joined in by resharing one such post and tagging @Specsavers, the optometry brand also known for its tongue-in-cheek approach.

Pringles didn’t shy away from their very public typo, they embraced it.

Obviously, Pringles isn’t the first brand to roll with the punches. The world’s most famous aromatic bitters brand Angostura Bitters arguably owes its $1.3 billion value to a simple, albeit easily preventable blunder.

In the mid 1800s, when the Siegert brothers took over the business from their founding father, they focused on growth through marketing which included entering their dad’s product in competitions.

Up against a deadline, they scrambled to get a new batch ready. While one brother sourced bottles, the other arranged the labels. But due to communication error, either the bottles were too small for the labels, or the labels too large for the bottles. Too late to correct the problem, they submitted to the competition.

While Angostura did not win that year, one of the judges advised them to make the oversized label permanent as a distinctive and memorable asset. The rest is history.

In 2014, the 250-year old fashion brand Allen Solly was dragged over hot social media coals for misspelling signage on a store that was “Comming Soon.” A simple but laughable mistake that deserved the simple but laughable response from the brand’s marketing team.

And it seems Pringles have embraced their error by expanding their campaign.

Or have they? Before this extension launched, Campaignlive.co.uk asked Pringles’ agency for a comment on the typo and received the response that there was “more to come.”

Did Pringles just pull off a misdirect, rather than a mistake?

The subsequent #MultiGRAINnotGRAN campaign could have easily been rapidly developed and deployed in response to their trending typo. But it could also have been part of the plan all along, strategically leveraging the TikTok generation who also happens to be their core audience. Even drawing @SpecSavers into the conversation since the eyewear brand has a history of adding its considerable voice to brand-on-brand social media chatter.

Mistake or misdirect, Pringles garnered more attention than that humdrum FMCG billboard could have done on its own.

This was the strategy behind a tweet from US snack brand Hostess when they wrote “Touchdown” on a baseball themed post. And when Monster.com congratulated the wrong team for winning the 2015 SuperBowl. Both were intentional errors to create some viral buzz, by both those who get the joke and the unaware knee-jerkers who jump at the chance to point out a brand’s booboos on social media. The latter is probably the larger group, but I’d love to see some hard data.

The strategy of viral buzz to gain an unfair share of attention even predates social media. Bernbach’s famous “Lemon” press ad for VW is an historic example of misdirection. Why would an auto brand use the one word you never want associated with your product, especially when that one word is the one-word headline? But it made the reader stop turning pages (or thumbscrolling in contemporary terms) and all was revealed in the body copy.

Today, brands don’t like relying on long copy. Consumer attention is famously and increasingly fleeting. And no one wants to issue an apology to consumers who didn’t get the joke or were too distracted to read past the provocative headline.

The misdirect is a delicate balancing act too. There was a time (in the early days of ‘viral’) when the strategy was to create something inauthentically bombastic to spark a conversation. But without the right nuance, consumer mindset, brand voice or narrative complexity, a brand’s big plans for a viral sensation can fall flat. Consumer response could be anything from a “meh” to a deflated sense of “oh, I see what you did there” to an outright feeling of betrayal if the brand’s duplicity becomes the topic of conversation. Remember Witchery’s 2009 ‘Man in the Jacket’ nightmare?

But making a low-level misdirect can increase the reach and impact of the reveal. And owning a low-level mistake can increase brand faith and respect. In both cases, the resultant attention is more bang for the buck, and the follow-through gives consumers an inner smile at the very least, which releases dopamine in our brains and chemically teaches our grey matter to associate that moment (that brand) with happiness. This may be in a very small way, but every moment matters. Create these moments enough, without overdoing it, and you’ve got people loving your brand before you’ve even tried to make them buy it.

With Pringles, we wonder if the mistake was intentional or not. Only time will tell.

Either way, the outtake is for brands to be more authentically fun, or more funnily authentic. Especially when they prove they are not infallible. Consumers will love them a little more.