Motrin Moms Fiasco Exposes User-Hostile Web Strategy

Over the weekend, an advertisement by Motrin posted on their website (and part of a larger ad campaign) raised the ire of a small, but vocal (via social media) group of moms over the issue of baby-wearing. I'm not going to rehash the whole story here, as others have already covered it well. Here are a couple of links to give you more background and analysis:

How Twittering Critics Brought Down Motrin Mom Campaign

The Motrin Moms Backlash by the Numbers

Moms Give Motrin a Headache

Social media is powerful stuff, and if you're going to try to play the social media game with things like viral video, you have to be prepared to fully play the game, which means, among other things:

1. Joining the conversation and getting a feel for your audience before you advertise to them.
2. Monitoring for reactions to your brand and more specifically to your advertising campaign (and when you launch a campaign, make sure you're prepared to monitor and respond).
3. Engaging quickly and authentically when things go wrong.

But I want to highlight something I uncovered during my participation in this "happening" -- the user-hostile web design of Motrin's web site and the parent company's. Allow me to lead you down the rabbit hole...

When I first learned about the Motrin controversy, I decided to go check out their site. I wanted to know more about Motrin's business - who makes them, who to contact, either as press or as a concerned consumer. There was a customer service phone number, but it wasn't in operation over the weekend.

1. At Motrin.com, there is no link to the parent company website.
2. At the bottom of the page it says the site is published by McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a Division of McNEIL-PPC, Inc. Note that there is no mention of Johnson & Johnson.
3. Any reasonable person would naturally expect to find the parent company at McNeilPPC.com, McNeil-PPC.com, or perhaps McNeil.com. All of these are owned by squatters, not Johnson & Johnson.
4. So I Googled McNeil-PPC. The #1 search result was http://Brands2LiveBy.com. Is that an official McNeil-PPC site? It's hard to tell. Is "Brands to live by" the company tag line? Very confusing. Not very good branding.
5. Anyway, Brands2LiveBy.com appears to be a McNeil site, but. Motrin is nowhere to be found on it.  (Tylenol, by the way, is nowhere to be found on it either)
6. So I thought I'd follow the "Hard-to-Find Products" link in the upper right-hand corner, since, I'm having a hard time finding this major brand product that's supposed to be a McNeil brand. It takes me to http://GreatHealthBrands.com (3rd-party site? Or McNeil site? Not clear.)
7. GreatHealthBrands.com pops up an alert in Firefox saying "Reported Attack Site", and that it may be being used to "steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damage your system." Needless to say, 3rd-party site or not, this doesn't reflect well on McNeil.
8. Note that nowhere along the way was there any indication that McNeil is a Johnson & Johnson company.  I finally, after about half an hour going through the above, tried Googling "McNeil Consumer Healthcare", which got me to the Johnson & Johnson Consumer Healthcare site.

Needless to say, this was a very frustrating experience. It reinforces the image of Johnson & Johnson as a large, impersonal corporation that is trying to make it as difficult as possible for consumers to find out who to talk to and what's really going on.

This could easily be solved with one simple change: provide a link in the footers of all their sites to the appropriate page on the parent company site.

More generally, though, let's see what lessons in web strategy we can glean from this.

1. Use the terms and brands your customers are familiar with. McNeil-PPC isn't a strong brand -- apparently it doesn't even merit its own website. Johnson & Johnson is a strong brand. Even if J&J wanted to reinforce the McNeil-PPC brand, they should say, "McNeil-PPC, a Johnson & Johnson company", or something like that.
2. Hyperlinking is your friend. Or, as they put it in The Cluetrain Manifesto (Thesis #7), "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy." Don't force people to work their way up a chain. The only options I had were a phone number that wasn't manned on the weekends and a customer service contact form (which, by the way, now appears to be out of order). Like I said, one hyperlink would have solved this.
3. Obfuscation is user-hostile. I'm not saying you have to put the CEO's direct line and email address on the front page, but make it easy for people to determine what the organizational structure and accompanying chain-of-command is.
4. Consistency is key. It's worth the time to make sure that at least the most salient aspects of your web presence are consistent. If Brands2LiveBy.com isn't an official current site, why is it even still up? And if it is, why doesn't it contain all the brands under the McNeil-PPC moniker? Old news can be old news, but anything that comes up in the top search engine rankings or that's linked to in you navigation system should be consistent.
5. Monitor your web presence. Routinely do searches for your company name and other brands. What comes up? How does it present you? Is it up-to-date with your current branding? If not, track it down and fix it, whether it's on an internal or third-party site.
6. Own your brand(s) online. It costs less than $10 a year to keep control of a domain. I'm not suggesting you should obtain every possible extension (.net, .org, .biz, etc.), but you should definitely own the .com domain for not only your company name, but also your products, any divisions or subsidiaries. Also, keep the domains for old products, company names (after a merger or acquisition, for example). You want to direct any traffic coming there to an appropriate current landing page.

Fortunately, most entrepreneurs don't have to deal with multi-site strategies as complex as Johnson & Johnson. Still, these are valuable lessons to keep in mind as you build your web presence. Take advantage of the fact that your size makes these things more manageable and do them better than the large corporations. You can create a user experience that's every bit as good, or better.