Needless to Say, We Must Save the Strawberries

How virality and reactive PR have saved the strawberries.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that recently, a number of customers have been purchasing punnets of strawberries only to find they’d been stitched up. Sewing needles have been found in a number of strawberries from a number of different brands purchased at Coles and Woolworths, and it’s been nothing but a PR disaster since. Interestingly though, despite everything else the big supermarkets have been in the media for lately, the supermarket giants are not the ones under fire.

Due to this string of more than 100 reports of the sabotaged fruit, strawberry farmers across the country have been forced to turf tens of thousands of strawberries after many retailers cancelled their orders following the fruit recalls (ABC News, 2018). What is interesting about all of this mishap though, is how the public have reacted. While at first, the sabotaged strawberries may have sparked outrage in many communities, specifically those immediately effected by the needle contamination, it has turned into an entire country rallying for these strawberry farms and supporting the industry and Aussie farmers.

But how? Since being put back on shelves after this disaster, retailers had to drastically reduce the price of strawberries in order to stimulate some action back into the strawberry market which has definitely made purchasing the fruit more enticing to customers despite the recent issue, a number of videos and posts on Facebook have been going viral, sparking the country’s interest.

Videos of Aussie farmers having to dump truckloads of strawberries have spread across social media life wildfire, along with desperate pleas from farmers to not discredit all strawberries, and the consumers are listening. Watch the heartbreaking Donnybrook Strawberries video here. This is a great example of how virality can help businesses, and a fantastic case of reactive PR.

Reactive PR or damage control is crucial for businesses and brands to ensure their reputation remains intact after public conflicts or disturbances, by ‘putting out the fire’ as soon as possible. In this case, the strawberry farmers have been very fortunate to have the power of the ‘Australian community’ behind them. With campaigns like #SmashaStrawb going around, promoting recipes that include strawberries, votes to support the farmers by buying strawberries while they are cheap, and even awareness campaigns asking consumers to ‘just cut ‘em in half’ to still encourage purchasing. All of these efforts have had the full support of Australians, with strawberry purchases spiking just a week after the original events occurred.

This is a great example of how virality can be beneficial to PR campaigns, and how crisis control can be undertaken in the wake of a huge disaster like this.