Most people don't like to be fooled. Marketers -- and their public relations advisors -- should always try to remember that.
When a company tries to trick people in hopes of selling product, it can be a recipe for disaster. The folks at ConAgra were caught off guard recently when a trick they tried to play backfired. Here's how it unfolded...
According to a story in The New York Times, a group of food bloggers and mommy bloggers were invited to a West Village brownstone restaurant supposedly run by celebrity chef George Duran, who hosts "Celebrity Cake-Off" on cable's TLC channel.
The bloggers in attendance got a surprise at the end of the evening. They were told, after dinner, that the lasagna they thought had been prepared by Chef Duran was actually a frozen meat and cheese lasagna from ConAgra's Marie Callendar product line. The unuspecting bloggers got another surprise when they were told their comments as they tried the faux-chef-prepared food had been taped by hidden cameras for possible PR and advertising use.
Hidden cameras are nothing new. They are often used in ads where shoppers are stopped in a supermarket and asked aqbout a product. And Allen Funt made a nice living from fooling people with hidden cameras on his "Candid Camera" TV show decades ago. And more recently, shows like "Punkd" catch celebs and semi-celebs in gags played out in front of hidden cameras.
The hidden-camera testimonials obviously use segments that are favorable to the product. On the cutting room floor are clips showing an unsuspecting person getting annoyed for being fooled or simply refusing to go for the money being offered in exchange for the unintended testimonial.
People generally don't like to be fooled. Imagine a group of bloggers attending an event expecting one thing and then being fed -- literally -- something totally different. They've taken their time expecting to review a fine dining experience, and then they learn they are being played to shill for a frozen food product.
This group of people who were tricked was not just a group of ordinary people. They are journalists with, in some cases, very big or influential bullhorns. And they let their displeasure with ConAgra's trickery go full-blast on their blog sites.
The blog Mom Confessionals wrote about the event, saying "Our entire meal was a SHAM. We were unwilling participants in a bait & switch...and there were cameras watching our reactions."
FoodMayhem.com wrote about the hypocracy of the host having a pre-dinner discussion session with talk about problems with artificial ingredients. "We discussed the sad state of chemical-filled foods," the blogger wrote, "and yet (they) fed me the exact thing I had said I did not want to eat."
Many bloggers who had been tricked wrote negative posts, going so far as to list all the chemical ingredients in the food, or citing things like the high amount of sodium in the product.
The reaction should not have come as a surprise to ConAgra and their big PR agency. A cute PR stunt like this is an open invitation for disaster. People -- especially those with a platform -- don't like to be fooled.
A cardinal rule in Public Relations is Be Honest; Don't Lie. And especially don't lie to a journalist.
It's just PR 101, isn't it?