“Less social media. More Snapchat.” Nice Try.

Did you watch the Super Bowl this year to cheer on the Chiefs, the 49ers, and/or Taylor Swift??

Did you turn it on to check out Usher on roller skates?

Or maybe you tuned in primarily to check out the latest attempt for major brands to rationalize spending $7mil for 30 seconds of commercial air time (not including production costs)??

I’m guessing many of you are like me and you turned it on for a combination of these entertainment extravaganzas!?

The commercials, as per usual, were a combination of inspirational , funny , head-shakingly bad , and a little bit of what did I just see? ? (All opinions my own ;-))?

But there was one commercial that just disturbed me so much as a marketing professional (and a parent) that I had to discuss it here: Snapchat’s “Less social media. More Snapchat” campaign.?

Market category misrepresentations?

Less than 10 years ago, Juul, the e-cigarette manufacturer, was trying to convince the world that their goal was to save the lives of a billion smokers by having them switch to vaping.? We have learned that Juul pods have as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes and more troubling, Juul’s blatant youth-centric marketing has put them at risk of going out of business completely as they wait and see if they’ll receive Federal approval to continue to sell its products in the US.

I guess it’s not shocking that Juul chose to mislead the market and disassociate itself with other nicotine product manufacturers because let’s face it, Big Tobacco isn’t necessarily the poster child of an attractive, low-risk market. Juul chose the “if you can’t join them, confuse them” approach to marketing.

And now it looks like Snapchat is trying to do the same thing.? I’m not an expert in the social media sector (or clearly?tobacco for that matter), so I was curious how Snapchat compared to some of the other services out there.? Assuming the data in this article is accurate, Snapchat is among the top 10 most active social media sites out there, but it is overshadowed by the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok who claim 2-4 times more monthly active users than Snapchat.

So Snapchat is far from being the 800-lb gorilla, but they’re big enough to make some noise.?And with this campaign, they’re not only trying to convince the world that they’re differentiated from other social media options - they’re hiding from reality and saying they’re not a social media company at all.

When I wrote about “My category creation stories ”, I summarized some options for defining your market category ranging from redefining or modernizing a legacy market category to creating a new market category. Snapchat confounded me because they did neither. They could have launched a new subsegment of the social media market (let’s call it “Responsible Social Media Platforms”). That could have been a big deal, especially if they shared some real plans on how they would get there!

But instead,? they completely disassociated themselves from their legacy category (“Less Social Media”) but decided to ignore positioning themselves in any category whatsoever, simply saying “More Snapchat”. That’s right up there with Juul trumpeting: Less smoking, more Juul!

Marketing annoyance or tricking parents?

Some may feel that consumers don’t care about market categorization and I’m just being an annoyed marketer for the sake of being annoyed. But I’m a parent and husband first and a marketer second. (Or maybe marketer 3rd or 4th, I need to assess my life priorities!)

As a parent, I’m very concerned about how my teens spend their time on social media and what they experience there. I know from their perspective that not being allowed on tools like Snapchat or Discord would be an incredible social burden for them since that’s the primary channels they use to communicate with friends. Yet I also hear endless stories of bullying, prejudice, drug glorification, online addiction, and endless other nightmares that are front and center.?Do I have the answer on how to parent in the age of social media? Unfortunately, no.?

But is Snapchat the messiah of social media that eliminates all of these very real concerns??That’s also a big no.? I don’t need Snapchat sharing a Super Bowl commercial showing fast running flashing images of “bad social media” vs their impression of “good social media.”? Sane people already know addiction to likes, trolling, and stupidity = bad and spreading love and happy thoughts = good.??

Snapchat completely missed the only thing that would have made me, as a parent, pay any attention whatsoever:? The HOW they are going to stop the bad and encourage the good! Did they think the commercial alone would convince the bullies, trolls, and the people addicted to their platform to 'do better'???

There’s only way I’ll ever buy into Snapchat disassociating themselves with the social media category, that they are still very much a part of.? It is when they differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack by making real changes to their service to protect people from harm.??

Snapchat may avoid calling themselves social media, just as Juul wasn’t a tobacco company - they were an e-cigarette manufacturer.? But if your customers are hurting, you’ve failed.

And denial isn’t a GTM strategy.?