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
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
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.
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 …
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…?
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