You probably know that Mothering Sunday is this weekend (at least you should); a day to pamper your Mum, treat her to lunch or just spend a bit of time together. With so many marketing campaigns in aid of treating Mum, you've probably already seen all of the Moon Pig ads and the offers on Chocolates & Flowers at Asda and Tesco.
One worth a mention:
In celebration of upcoming Mother’s Day Penguin Books campaigned for twitter users to tweet using the hashtag #YourMum every lunchtime, for people to be in with a chance of winning a book gift; at the same time encouraging social media users to buy a book for their Mother’s Day gifts. Seems fairly innocent...right?
When the campaign went live twitter users immediately trolled the innocent brand proposition by interpreting the forever notorious ‘Your Mama’ jokes. People using the hashtag #YourMum obviously used this time to reminisce on school banter and it took a while for Penguin Books to realise that ‘Your Mum’ meant something quite different. To make matters slightly more cringe-worthy the Penguin hashtag clashed with the top trending hashtag #InternationalWomensDay.
After the realisation, Penguin Books quickly tweeted about what they thought was an innocent hashtag “Thanks for pointing our #YourMum has an alternative meaning you guys! Now back to the books...” Even their competitor, Waterstones decided to get involved by tweeting “@PenguinUKBooks You’re braver than we are, Penguin.”
If this really was an innocent mistake, its evidence of the importance of googling first; if not, then it’s got people talking and is a pretty good (if awkward) PR stunt.