While American Eagle’s stock price rose, it seems to have peaked, plateaued and is now trending down a bit.
This leaves us to ponder the important questions beneath 21st century crises like this.
Let's start with one non-question: Isn't all publicity good publicity? No. Those who say that probably haven’t spent enough time with business leaders (and employees) suffering severe PR crises that erupted through no fault of their own.
An important follow-up question: Can controversy be good publicity? Sometimes.
We don’t know whether American Eagle considered that possibility when hiring an actor who looks like Sydney Sweeney. Certainly the pun and play on words of the campaign ("Sydney Sweeney has good jeans") is striking and catches attention.
The negative follow-up responses — that Sweeney represents a narrow ideal of white femininity, or that it's about time that someone who looks like her is the face of a broad campaign — miss the overarching concern here: Today, every ad campaign holds the possibility of provoking negative reactions, especially online.
Sometimes that controversy helps, sometimes it hurts.
It’s like riding a wild bull. Sometimes you stay on, and sometimes you lose control of the narrative and that does more harm than good.
American Eagle got some short-term traction from the immediate reactions. Will it last? If the history of these types of crises is any predictor, no.
I’m sure American Eagle wants to sell jeans to people who look like Sydney Sweeney. I’m also sure American Eagle wants to sell jeans to lots of people who don’t look like her. How will this controversy help them do that, long-term?
Sadly, at the speed of crisis today, when it’s time to find out, no one will be paying attention. They will be ten crises down the road.
Before this controversy is completely gone, let’s consider a few options that could potentially have produced great results without unnecessary controversy:
American Eagle could have created a campaign with more actors representing the different demographics the company also wants to attract.
It could also have had a good set of alternative crisis scenarios in place just in case the reaction to the campaign outweighed the positives.
In our work, this type of scenario planning is crucial to the success of any business effort that includes a substantial investment of time, people – and money. There’s too much riding on the fickle attentions of social media today to pass “go” without considering these factors.
It’s not the 1950s anymore, and Mad Men don’t control the narrative, especially on social media.
Companies like American Eagle can be part of the narrative and benefit from it. To do so, they need to consider that other audiences in the conversation also have the power to affect the flow of the story, even sending it in directions that they didn't expect, and that may not be beneficial to their brand.
