Last week, Twitter, Instagram and any other social media platform you could possibly think of had a flurry of posts all about a handsome high school boy working a target. This all started when a pair of teenage girls saw Alex working at Target, took a picture of him, and posted it on Twitter. The post went viral after a famous London-based twitter handle retweeted the image and Alex went from 144 Twitter followers to over 600k.
What was astonishing wasn’t how fast Alex became popular (we’ve seen plenty of people going viral on the internet), but what 1 particular company tried to do when all of this hype was taking place.
Allow me to introduce Breakr, a company that describes what they do as “connects fans to their fandoms”, as vague as that sounds. When I first read this, so many questions plagued my mind like ‘how do you connect the fans?’ and ‘who exactly are you connecting them to?’ (fandom is a huge collection of individuals that may include the celebrity/group the fandom is based on) but these questions are for a different story.
What Breakr did was incredibly gutsy in my opinion. During the onslaught of posts and #alexfromtarget Breakr decided it would be a good idea to claim credit for helping make #alexfromtarget go viral, without any real proof! They first claimed that Alex had given permission to a Breakr ”representative” (the London-based twitter handle) to take a photo of hims but Alex, the ”representative” and Target announced they had no affiliation with Breakr.
In my opinion, Breakr really made a bad play in trying to get their name out there. Breakr was trying to get its name out there by jumping onto the bandwagon which was greatly populated by its major customer segment, “fandoms”. Looking at the business model canvas, it would have actually made sense for Breakr to claim credit but only if they had a better argument and actual proof of actually helping #alexfromtarget go viral.
Look at it this way, Breakr’s main customer segment are teenagers who are invested in celebrities and major public icons. By claiming they were the ones to make #alexfromtarget go viral, they were not only further cementing their value proposition of connecting fans to their fandoms but also showing potential celebrities that they were indeed successful at marketing an individual/group. This would be their key partners, potential celebrities who wanted to be in the eye of public and potentially pull a ‘Beyoncé’ (Beyonce dropped a surprise album without any marketing whatsoever and managed to sell 617,213 copies within 3 days). Looking at the business model canvas it would make perfect sense for Breakr to try going down this particular path.
However this brings up the issue of Ethics in the Industry. Relating this back to Friedman’s article, it would seem that Breakr is following his concept. The only Corporate Social Responsibility that Breakr needs to adhere by is to create and sustain profits, as long as they are not breaking the law. Breakr first claimed they were the cause of #alexfromtarget going viral and if they had continued this claim, I believe they would have been potentially sued. Instead, they claimed they believed that they were behind everything but was mistaken and issued an apology on their Twitter account “Apologies for any confusion tonight, @iauscalum was not working for us but we did help promote the picture with the #alexfromtarget”. They didn’t break the law in any way as they corrected their ”mistake” while still getting their name out to the public. This would make Breakr seem that they are still adhering to CSR and are still technically ethical.
All in all, it’s interesting to see what some companies will do to push their product onto the market. What I’m interested to see is if Target will use this opportunity that came their way and how they will build this free marketing they received.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/11/05/the-alex-from-target-marketing-hoax-was-itself-a-marketing-hoax-because-everything-on-the-internet-is-a-lie/
http://www.kare11.com/story/life/2014/11/05/alex-from-target-becomes-an-internet-superstar/18554459/
http://breakrnation.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyonc%C3%A9_(album)
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/reader.action?docID=10187339&ppg=171