Airbnb’s disastrous tax ads are a lesson in bad brandvertising
Airbnb has pulled a series of ads in San Francisco about the tax they have to pay. In this guest post Hugh Stephens argues the company misread where their brand is positioned in market.
You might have seen ‘sharing economy’-come-hotel-but-not-quite brand Airbnb’s recent out of home ads run in San Francisco as a response to increased regulatory action from local government to force ‘hosts’ to pay the 14 per cent hotel tax required by the city.
The ads facetiously call on various government bodies to spend the extra tax on a range of initiatives (presumably?) aimed to get consumers to take Airbnb’s side about the regulatory actions, and drive some positive word of mouth.
Day Around The Bay: Is This An Actual Airbnb Ad? https://t.co/xvVO7JdJOS pic.twitter.com/F8FKtCMVTR
— SFist (@SFist) October 22, 2015
@anthonyha also in Union square: pic.twitter.com/Rlwej1yuHX
— Sasha Aickin (@xander76) October 22, 2015
@JesseThorn @Airbnb going after all underpaid public servants pic.twitter.com/6cJWYhqAjY
— Rob Fangman (@FangmanRob) October 22, 2015
https://twitter.com/jden415/status/657016998656802816?ref_src=twsrc%5Et
Suffice to say, the ads don’t quite ring true, and come across as just passive-aggressive. It’s in quite stark contrast with other ‘guerrilla’ style use of outdoor by online companies. My favourite example is this one from Hipchat, who in 2011 took out a billboard outside San Francisco and Palo Alto saying ‘Y U NO USE HIPCHAT?’ which has the perfect mix for their audience to get people taking about the campaign, roughly a year after launch (2011).
Source: Hipchat Blog
At the time of the billboard above, HipChat was still very much a ‘challenger brand’. It was a new product, aimed at a very technical audience, who generally used nothing (email) or cobbled together solutions like IRC – this was well before Slack was around. The ad above is perfect for the audience – technology nerds and developers – and was before the whole ‘brands-using-memes’ thing became tiresome.
So why did Airbnb do so poorly? The simple answer is that they lost sight of where the brand was positioned in the minds of their audience. Airbnb is no longer the ‘challenger brand’, a persona that technology startups love to use. The challenger brand persona is loved by the early adopter crowd, who love the concept of supporting something going up against the big guy – so it’s really effective.
But those days are gone. Much like other similarly sized startups (Uber, Twitter, Tinder etc), the brand needs to eventually move away from being a challenger in order to attract the ‘middle of the [adoption] curve’ audience. This crowd typically responds better to messaging about trust, convenience, making/saving money, outcomes (get dates) or perks (follow celebrities).
It’s challenging, because it’s easy to continue to feel like you’re a startup and forget that irrespective of your internal culture, valuation or size (Airbnb has a US$24bn valuation, Uber US$50bn) – what matters is how the audience will interpret the content. Airbnb is no longer a David, it’s a Goliath.
While these types of tongue-in-cheek campaigns can be really effective, breaking the ‘product marketing’ mould usually in broad circulation (such as the recent Turnbull ‘letter’ from Australian Aid in the Oz), it needs to be true to the brand – which is of course partly created by the business, but mostly in how it is perceived by the audience. Not staying up-to-date with how people perceive the brand, or doing something that is totally opposite to that perception, will never see a good response.
- Hugh Stephens is a marketing technologist and Tweets @hughstephens
this is something that just didnt work, not really a massive PR disaster.
they pulled the ads resonably quickly.
a few trolls on social media as usual, but the company will carry on and thousands of customers still use airbnb
all very easy to dissect with perfect hindsight after the event
but good on them for trying something different
so many marketers arent brave enough to do anything that is non-bland
User ID not verified.
I agree with HenryT. Being bold takes big bets, sometimes they pay off, other times they do not. This is one of those that didn’t.
Too often though the bold and big bets get squashed internally before they even get to brief, or post brief, get watered down during revisions.
Some really good analysis there Hugh, completely agree with the Challenger vs. Dominant brand positioning here. The challenge disruptors (like Uber, AirBnB, Tesla and others) have is that whilst they may have become the Goliath, they are still the challenger of that industry. That is, Uber is still fighting to change the MO in the taxi industry world wide regardless of how big they have become.
User ID not verified.
The reaction to these ads needs to be understood in the context of the huge sum that AirBnB spent on fighting Proposition F (a legislative change that would have damaged the AirBnB business model in SF).
In a broader sense, nobody likes it when a large company brags about having paid taxes. In this case, the amount they paid is actually the result of a settlement after litigating over the actual tax owed of $25 million.
So, there are a bunch of other circumstances that made this an extremely out-of-touch campaign …
User ID not verified.
Does anyone have any factual stats on how much say Accor, or Hilton pay in tax in say the US or even Aus v AirBnB?
Likewise for Uber v the traditional taxi firms.
It would be interesting to understand if the new digital plays actually pay more tax…?
User ID not verified.
This is stupid because the people these ads are to target unintelligent, low socio economic people who have no idea about taxes, both their own and the taxation system in general. In short, you need to dumb it down
User ID not verified.