But what comes to Ragu… Are you overacting? Maybe. But more importantly: does it matter?
I think it does. I think it’s important for marketers to be able to define their target market niches better and more importantly: know their target audience.

The important lesson here is the exact same as with Motrin Moms – don’t insult your target audience and KNOW your target audience. 80% of the moms who saw the Motrin ad did NOT get offended, only the 20% of the babywearing moms got offended.

Same is probably here. 80% of Ragu’s target audience who see this video will not get offended, but maybe 20% will, heck, maybe 5% will, who knows. But the most important thing here is that whatever the % is  that is the exact target audience they were trying to promote this video for. I’m NOT an expect of “daddy bloggers” but many that I know are very hands on dads and help much more at home than open a Ragu jar every now and then or grill for dinner and I completely understand the reaction, even if it’s in the minority.

I think it’s important that we talk about this type of campaigns to better understand and learn to use social media in more targeted way. The benefit of using social media IS in reaching to smaller demographic of a very specific target audience instead of using traditional media to the masses. I think it’s doable – even when you have a CPG product  like Ragu sold in every grocery store.

Short sighted because there is more to parenting and eating than just moms, but that is their choice and they get to make it.

I’m not making any assumptions, just going on what they told me and what I’ve seen.

Again.. Naive at best!

There are a boatload of bad brand managers and bad agencies …. doesn’t mean that agencies are the source of the problem. You want some insight into reality you look me up. We can talk about how the sudden availability of quants after the financial markets imploded has injected a irrational focus on aggregate data and NPS calculations in brand managers, and created a disincentive to care about individual interactions with consumers. We cab also talk about how brand managers at big CPG companies are rarely qualified to give their social media agency a brief, or how they are so web to their advertising creative that the put blinders on to common sense.

I’ve never like their sauce either. It was always too watery and not spiced right for my tastes.

@sarahmontague

It is a great learning experience.

Maybe I am over reacting. But, in the end hopefully someone learns something from it all.

With that said there is merit in this discussion of how everyone, you included, has stated this is a new arena and there are not hard and fast rules for social media…we are all learning…brands and us.

Now my own natural marketing mind would be  (if I was ragu and their team executing this campaign) reading your posts  and saying to myself, “well hell’s bells we missed that one, how can we extend this conversation?”

To your point, while the internet never sleeps, how reasonable is it that we expect everyone to not live a balanced life and have that important family time, as as well as sleep?  What have we come to as a world that expects a brand to have someone “talking 24/7″?

So Ragu choose to work with mom bloggers this time.  How about instead, showing them the opportunity to work with dad bloggers too?

Hoping to not put a huge target on my back when I ask, do dad bloggers have the same “pull and impact right now as mom bloggers?”

Great we are discussing this-where was all this years ago when I was changing the face of parenting with my son’s father #justsayin it’s been a long hard road.

One name and don’t offer anything for the customer who may be looking for your product in their country. As someone in England, I do feel quite insulted if a company posted tweets promoting their US campaign directed at me, then discover that it’s only for places I can’t reasonably get to.

I wonder if the Companies forget the internet is very international, I often play online with an American, a Dutchman, and a Australian, all at the same time!

At least, Discovery Channel USA, said that  @mythbusters:twitter  was run for the US Customers, but know that the UK Discovery Channel shows the program too. ( http://twitter.com/#!/MythBusters/statuses/12572183637270528

Oh yeah, I’d better be off: I’m making Tea.

Tim

First off, who hasn’t been hit up by a brand with a crappy spam campaign on Twitter? This stuff is a dime a dozen and to be honest why give away the free advice? They’ll learn quickly that it’s bad form to do this. You’re obviously pointing that out, but it’s Ragu; a brand I’m sure you’re not pining over with posters of jars on your wall next to Farrah Fawcett.

Secondly, why is it surprising that a below average product would put out a below average campaign? Ragu is not targeting sauce lovers, Moms or Dads. They’re targeting people who hate food. Ragu is the scourge of jarred sauce. I’ve been out to eat with you CC. I know you don’t hate food. I’d only be offended if Ragu thought I was in their target market and would actually like them.

Also, I saw two of their ambassador bloggers had Italian last names. I’ve already contacted the embassy to ensure their red, white and green membership cards are revoked. 

Oh and if we’re giving out free advice, here’s a simple and super quick sauce recipe for those who are in a hurry. 

1. Buy a can, not a jar, of simple marinara sauce (Trader Joe’s has a good one)
2. Toss it in a pot and warm it up.
3. Mix in dry Italian seasoning, oregano, salt and pepper
4. Stir
5. Taste
6. Pour over pasta or on pizza dough. 

If you don’t have hours to simmer a homemade sauce this is the way to go.

The marketing world clings to stereotypes and demographic reports for a reason, they are (for the most part) fairly representative. They may offend some folks, but the average joe who actually will go buy Wrangler’s because Brett Farve endorses them, doesn’t notice.

This is very different, as they called this attention on themselves and didn’t bother to take even a minute to figure out who they were targeting when they sent out those tweets (mass tweeting like that is a bad idea anyways), but it’s not surprising.

I don’t do much social marketing anymore, but one thing I always tried to stress to my bosses when I did was that social isn’t like traditional marketing and when you treat it as such, you will not get the results you want. Ragu took a standard approach on a non-standard campaign, and they’re getting bitten in the ass for it.

That is why I wanted to put that in there because over reacting seems to be the norm.

My honestly hope is that they learn from this. We ALL make mistakes, but it is what we learn from them that really defines us.

The level of grunt work and effort to get it right takes more time than anyone realizes. You just can’t pull up a list of ______ bloggers and think that it is going to work. Sure, you can cast a wide net if you are not looking for great results, but I know how much time I’ve put into pulling together outreach lists in the past and it takes days to get them right.
Thanks for including our book in your possible reading. I love that it is helping so many people.

This underscores one of the greatest challenges in honest to goodness social media oriented marketing – to do it properly it requires a fair degree of effort.  And, more importantly, a commitment to prioritize that time investment and ensuring you have the right people in place to execute.  

Again my opinions but it will be very interesting to see how they react.  Ironically the nature of the way these things work they have a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on their mistake and turn into a positive conversation with their audience.   

I am teaching a MBA Marketing Strategy course right now and am having my class read Scott’s New rules of marketing and PR – (Content rules is a recommended read  this is a perfect example of what not to do under the new rules – and I’m planning on using it as an example.  

Good stuff, thanks for taking the time to share it with your audience.

I’m just hoping that this post helps someone do it better.

It will be interesting to see if and how Ragu responds to this. 

As we talk about on our Cast of Dads podcast, the role of the dad has evolved, with shared responsibilities, and definitely breaking the stereotypes that are out there. It’s time for big and small brands to understand this and stop using modern conversation and engagement media with ancient and outdated target audience and demographic stereotypes!

Actually there are a boatload of big brands that vomit Tweets and ignore incoming. That’s because they probably have outsourced to an agency who has a junior staff member monitoring the feed. Guaranteed they are only measuring RT’s and nothing else./rant over/

PS- I still have nighmares over Motrin Moms….