Skittles

Skittles are a variety of bite-size multi-flavored chewy candies made by Wrigley's, a subsidiary of Mars Inc. Their web address is www.wrigley.com/skittles.
The pricing strategy Wrigley's uses for it's Skittles Brand is Competitive Pricing
Skittles uses e Marketing such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. for it's main source of promoting but also Promotes the product on television commercials, billboards, and magazine ads. Their ads are quite colorful and are seen almost everywhere which is also how the actual product is, colorful, and can be bought in almost all convenience and grocery stores.
The Social Media campaign that backfired and I am blogging about today is when Skittles tried to launch Twitter onto their website, some pranksters got into the site and wrote things such as skittles gives your child cancer and skittles is the root of all evil and is associated with pedophilia.
Skittles objectives were to increase brand awareness with Twitter.
The target market is consumers ages 18-44 and the secondary target market is kids ages 6-17.
Tools used in Social Media are Facebook with over 25 million likes and Twitter with over 65,000 likes.
In 2009 Skittles attempted to launch their Twitter account, and used the hash-tag "skittles" to link to their account, which had any person to tag the word go right to skittles twitter page.It ended up causing Twitter to crash within 2 days.Due to not regulating what appears on their site, the Social media Campaign had some downfalls.
The campaign was pulled 2 days after it launched due to profanity and negativity on the page. With children being a secondary market, this was not expected to be found on a homepage.Skittles thought everyone would have good things to say about the product, but in reality, that would never happen. Skittles just had to adjust a few things, and include an age limit and filter everything  for its twitter page.
The fact that Skittles did not regulate what could be seen on its Twitter page caused the ad to backfire. The company jumped into social media too quickly without researching what could happen if they followed though with the campaign. They were being Naive but also too confident for something that was so new back in 2009.
I think the campaign was a good start to better promoting for the company. To be a good businessman you must always take the leap, which is what they did. Although it blew up in their face, Skittles corrected it and are now taking off in the world of social media marketing. They learned from their mistake!
I would suggest that the company always thoroughly examine a plan before implementing it. If Skittles had just done its research, seen what other companies had been doing, and knew what twitter was and how has-tagging worked, they would have known that all the bad hash-tags would show up on their Twitter page, and that not everyone has nice things to say.
I would have done the same thing if I'd been the marketing executive for Skittles. The campaign was removed in a very timely manner, and they had corrected the Twitter page to keep the profanity off the site.