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Snickers

Jordan and Snickers UK Twitter stunt – a PR success or #Fail?

By Stephen Graham

January 24, 2012 | 4 min read

Katie Price found another way of earning a dollar this week, when she began Tweeting words of more than one syllable and offering insight into the economic state of the nation. However, it turned out that the highlight intelligent tweets were not actually being written by the former glamour model, and that actually it was all a stunt to promote Snickers. If there's one thing that social media fans detest it is dishonesty for commercial gain. Stephen Graham, Account Executive at Willoughby PR and WPR Digital discusses whether the strategy is likely to have been a success.

As celebrities fearlessly spout forth from the digital roundtable of life, it is expected that amongst the publicity-vetted blandness of the regular tweet, there will be on occasion, a 140 character gem.

If you are one of @MissKatiePrice’s, aka Jordan’s, 1.5m followers, this will no doubt have been the case on Sunday. I don’t believe I was alone in dropping my cup of tea as @MissKatiePrice informed me that “Large scale quantitative easing in 2012 could distort liquidity of Govt. bond market. #justsaying.” The economic aphorisms and astute comments continued throughout the day, making for an altogether rather refreshing break from the usual inane musings on horse-riding, celebrity big brother, sugar, spice and all things nice (…or pink!).

By the time Jordan had commented on the Chinese GDP I think most people had presumed some sort of twitter-jacking or account hacking had occurred – but who knew it was actually a PR stunt by Mars owned chocolate bar, Snickers.

@MissKatiePrice then tweeted the following:

“You’re not you when you’re hungry @SnickersUK #hungry #spon http://lockerz.com/s/176796815”

So far, big brands only seem to be pouring investments into promoted tweets to generate ‘buzz,’ so I for one found the whole thing quite refreshing and imaginative. Clearly, based on the consequent reverberations across the social web, the success of the stunt on the whole (which apparently also included @AmirKingKhan and @BeefyBotham) is still up for debate, if not already deemed a #fail.

According to most interpretations, the stunt suggests that not only does a Snickers bar restore you to normality; it also relieves you of serious, worthwhile opinions, inducing somewhat more vacuous cultural observations – i.e. underwear and celebs.

Yes, @SnickersUK have now become the bête noir for many a disapproving tweeter – the brand insulted Katie Price’s intelligence (hmmmm) and further insinuated that eating a Snicker’s bar makes you unintelligent and inane (a bit harsh, @MissKatiePrice does have 1.5m followers who quite enjoy her regular micro-blogging activity and as far as I see it, she is quite commercially savvy in her own right).

I say kudos to Miss Price for her good humour in all of this and well done to Snickers UK for getting everyone talking – including a piece in The Sun. The message may be up for debate but I have a sneaky feeling Snickers UK don’t mind that at all. But, what do you think?

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