Social media case study: Tesco’s social media vacuum
7th April 2011, 10:48 am by Simon Phillips
Adam Leyland’s description of new Tesco boss Philip Clarke’s use of Twitter in The Grocer this week made for an interesting read.
On 18th March Philip Clarke tweeted: “in a social media and social commerce meeting”.
Good to hear that social media is on the radar of Britain’s top grocery boss.
However, the article then goes on to suggest that Philip Clarke’s Twitter silence last week was due to him grappling with a PR disaster at Tesco as their buy one get it free plus cash (BOGIFPC) “Double the Difference” campaign went into meltdown.
Using social media, consumers found they could exploit a huge loophole in the campaign by buying certain products at Tesco that were priced cheaper elsewhere and could actually make a cash profit. Pre-social media times, the effort to price check thousands of product lines simply wouldn’t have been worth the effort and this campaign would probably have been fine.
But social media is part of our daily lives. So when a simple site was created – www.pricechecklogicalinternetsolutions.com- allowing consumers to easily check which products they could buy and make a profit on, they used it in their thousands. As word spread on consumer forums and sites like Moneysavingexpert, Tesco were forced to pull the offer and face an inevitable furore on their Facebook page and elsewhere.
Tesco aren’t the first big brand to get caught like this and there are now lots of well documented case studies about how customers leveraging social media can force brands into taking action they would rather not have to.
While this was quite an unfortunate thing to happen to Tesco, what it would be interesting to know is if during the meeting about social media that Philip Clarke attended, did someone (like Tesco’s social media agency) not point out this could happen? Were they not briefed properly about future offline campaigns and how they could be impacted by the online world? We will never know for sure.
One thing’s for certain – unless agencies stop advising their clients that social media is just a channel, without looking at the wider business or brand strategy and how social media can impact this strategy, situations like what happened at Tesco will happen again and again.
Social media has to inform and be informed by all other business initiatives; it does not happen in a vacuum and will ultimately fail if it does.
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Paul Barnett:
This article (and discussion) is also very interesting when it comes to Tesco’s use of social media – http://neilcocker.com/2011/03/23/an-open-letter-to-philip-clarke-ceo-of-tesco/.
It seems that Phillip Clarke’s understanding of social media is severely limited!
7 April 2011, 11:01 amJames Whatley:
Good piece of analysis Simon.
7 April 2011, 11:13 amWell done.
alastair walker:
Excellent post. Too many clients simply see social media as a `bolt-on’ and lack a clear strategy behind their presence on FB, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.
That said, I think it’s difficult in any large company to get every detail of a marketing campaign 100% right – basically people attend meetings, but don’t make a viable contribution. The internal politics of a company can sometimes be the root cause of failure, rather than the particular application of a marketing idea.
I admire Tesco for dabbling with QR codes on the launch of Call of Duty, I think as a market leader it’s inevitable they will try some things with mixed results. But better to be in the vanguard than the guard’s van…
7 April 2011, 1:03 pmlinks for 2011-04-07 « Design Studies at Dundee:
[...] Social media case study: Tesco’s social media vacuum "One thing’s for certain – unless agencies stop advising their clients that social media is just a channel, without looking at the wider business or brand strategy and how social media can impact this strategy, situations like what happened at Tesco will happen again and again. [...]
7 April 2011, 5:02 pmTim:
Sorry, am I missing the point on this? It sounds like a fairly standard pricing campaign that was exploited by the Internet community and spread using social media. What about this was Tesco making a mistake in their social media strategy? If they had done an offline offer would the same result not have occurred?
As far as I’m concerned this falls into the same category as Amazon offering flat screen TVs for 99p and other things like this. I’d expect these kind of exploits to be monitored by internal systems regardless of whether there is monitoring of social media.
I’m not saying that the online/offline world lines aren’t blurring, but I don’t see this as a major mis-step in terms of social media by Tesco…
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