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The Marketing Woes of Juneteenth

While the month of June has been widely celebrated as Pride month, President Biden has recently added a new, now-official, holiday for Juneteenth, the day marking the official emancipation of slaves in America. In a similar fashion to how brands market around Pride month, Juneteenth has given brands a reason to engage consumers and review their own commitments to diversity and inclusion. However, unlike Pride month, Juneteenth marketing campaigns have a much higher risk of coming off as insensitive or foolish due to the nature of the holiday. Last year, many companies started to close their doors for the soon-to-be statutory holiday including companies like Nike, Target, and Twitter. While these efforts were met with positive reactions, there have been several that have seen nothing but backlash, specifically Old Navy and the NHL’s San Jose Sharks.

Old Navy:

Old Navy, the clothing and accessories retailer, has been under fire recently in the wake of their Juneteenth marketing campaign. While the campaign started with good intentions, their implementation was subpar to say the least. Old Navy, with the help of influencer agency Mavrck, sent out a pitch email to over 300 black influencers asking them to apply to be a part of the campaign and buy a Juneteenth T-shirt to wear in sponsored posts. Typically, influencers are gifted products with the understanding that the post’s engagement would be the “payment” for the product.

On top of the apparent “invoice” that Old Navy sent out, they also low-balled their influencers. Offering $425 for one post and 3 individual stories is well below the industry average, whereby influencers charge an average of $25 per post, per 1000 followers. Therefore, that flat rate of $425 would only be reasonable if the user had 17,000 followers, the problem was that most of the influencers that they reached out to had upwards of 100,000 followers (charging roughly 2,500 per post).

After receiving tremendous backlash, Old Navy pulled the campaign and issued a statement discussing the disappointment they felt. Included in the statement was the reiteration and amplification of their commitment to diversity, however that doesn’t mask the self-inflicted image that the brand tried to profit off of Juneteenth.

San Jose Sharks:

A quickly deleted tweet by the official San Jose Sharks received a lot of criticism of the “careless insensitivity” one twitter user wrote. The tweet in question, consisted of an image of the teams mascot (a shark snapping a hockey stick with its teeth) biting off the shackles of slavery, as seen below:

This was a problematic tweet and as such, got a lot of negative feedback on social media. Some users were saying how outrageous and offensive the tweet was, while others were sympathizing with the organization since Juneteenth is a brand-new holiday and brands may not know the proper way to market it yet. After receiving a lot of backlash, the designer of the graphic was quoted saying “The Shark biting through the chains represents the San Jose Sharks taking a stand against systemic racism and it also symbolizes the importance that professional sports organizations play in taking a stand and recognizing that change starts within.” While this may be the right mentality behind the graphic, the public did not agree. On June 18th I posed a screenshot of the aforementioned tweet a Facebook marketing group called The Daily Carnage to see how members of that community would react to the post, and as expected, they hated it. Some of the more Liked comments are:

- Surely that went through an approval process. And no one said, "...Can we not?" 😬

- At least its historically accurate. We all know that sharks literally ended slavery by biting chains lol 😂 😂

- The cherry on top of this visual cringe is that millions of slaves who didn't survive horrendous conditions while crossing the ocean were thrown overboard to become shark food...(Pretty sure many were still alive but sick when thrown overboard, too.)Like, the design and disconnected attempt to be on top of current events is bad enough when the holiday is about the end of slavery, but to include a freaking shark in it? Nope. Nope nope nope.

In closing, it makes perfect sense why these brands want to promote marketing campaigns for Juneteenth, however we are still in a trial and error period where the metaphorical line between what is deemed appropriate and what is deemed not is blurry. One way to promote the holiday is to close your doors, like Nike and Target. If you take the approach like Old Navy and the San Jose Sharks, you may want to get a few other opinions on the campaign before. So, the question remains, how should brands market for Juneteenth, because as of now, these efforts have been disastrous.