Week 10 - Assignment 3

           The article I chose for this assignment was “When a Brand Does Well Even When It’s Called ‘Racist”. This was one of the first articles to pop up when I searched ‘Advertising Research’ in the NPR search bar, and caught my eye quickly as I was wondering what this could have been about.
This article talks about how a company, Heineken, known for it’s alcoholic beverages, released a commercial ad that stated “Lighter is Better”. The ad was called out for it’s racism by Chance the Rapper. In the commercial, a light-skinned bartender slides a beer by three black people till it gets to a light skin customer adding the words at the end, “lighter is better”.
           The independent variable for the article would be the commercial it’s self and the defendant being the sales of the beer itself. There were no graphs or data in this article but it does state how one morning after the commercial was released and Chance the Rapper had his comment on Twitter, “Heineken stock was up — that isn't proof that it was positively impacted by the controversy, but it certainly shows it wasn't hurt by it.” Even though this company released a commercial that was inappropriate and criticized on a world wide social media network by a famous rapper, the sales of their beer was never hurt by this.
           I do believe the conclusion is true because as stated previously, there was no evidence in there data showing the commercial hurt their sales. I went to the Heineken page and they had an operating profit was +9.3% with no impact from the ad. I find it interesting that there was no impact by this ad but at the same time do not. As talked about in the article, even a negative message can expand how many viewers a company gets. As stated in the article, “All press is good press” so even though they had a bad review on a worldwide social media website from a famous rapper, they were still getting press views and consumers to check out the ad to see what the talk was about.
           If I was asked to redo the study I would try to find an actual representation of the sales from Heineken to show how there was no impact. I did try going onto their page and looking for this but there wasn’t a graph showing what I thought was suitable for this assignment and/or my explanation. 

All the information above was obtained from the links below:

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/29/597942725/when-a-brand-does-well-even-when-its-called-racist

http://www.theheinekencompany.com/media/media-releases/press-releases/2018/02/2167853