Marketing Begins At Home

Maybe I’m just being a sanctimonious jerk, but…

The other night I noticed certain Mommy bloggers / tweeters hawking a brand of children’s lunch foods owned by a company not known for promoting eating this is – shall we say – healthy. This particular product (rhymes with “unchables”) has more sodium in a single serving than my driveway after a snowstorm and has about as much nutritional value as a cheesecake and a can of soda. And  you wonder why Johnny can’t even get out of his chair, let alone read.

The company behind all of this is owned by a conglomerate better known for pushing cigarettes to minors in any country that will let it get away with it.

The promotion itself was quite slick. They even asked respondents to put the appropriate hashtags in their responses. I’m sure it was all very well thought out by very smart and social media-savvy people and it will win scads of awards and be written up in all the social media marketing books that seem to arrive on the bookshelves with alarming regularity ….

But….

Are we really doing ourselves any favors when we stoop to this level? Giving crap away for free to mommy bloggers doesn’t make it any less crappy. And putting the veneer of social media hipness over it just makes the whole thing seem sleety.

At least to me.

But don’t let me rain on your parade by being so sanctimonious.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Marketing to Mommy Bloggers and The FTC (cindikate.com)
• Three Reasons Not to Use Influencer Engagement (socialmediatoday.com)