Walkin’ the Walk
Whether it’s in social media or in any of the other materials meant for your clients and customers, what you say has to match how you act and how you perform.
Otherwise, you’re just “talkin’ the talk” and not “walkin’ the walk” as they say.
You may claim to be the best at fulfilling orders, or providing the best technology. Maybe you tout your company as delivering the absolute best in customer service, or that you are the most creative/diverse/welcoming/etc. Whatever it is, if you can’t truly live up to that culturally across the company – from the CEO down to whoever answers the phones or swaps texts and chats with customers – you shouldn’t be saying it.
That applies not only to your mission statements and promotional materials, but to the various social media posts as well. They have to be consistent with your culture, your image, and your business model. If not, the disconnect can be painful.
Lululemon is finding that out right now, with some well-deserved mockery for a recent tweet that promoted a special workshop titled “Decolonizing Gender,” designed to “unveil historical erasure and resist capitalism.”
This is from a company that takes a few bucks of stretchy material and combines some magical marketing and branding to turn it into leggings and other products that cost upwards of $500. The average price for a pair of leggings is said to be about $128.
That fact that the company is reputed to be worth about $40 billion should really be more of an argument for embracing capitalism, not resisting it.
Sure, companies like Lululemon feel tremendous pressure to be hip, edgy, and woke, but this is a clear case where the message of this tweet is completely at odds with the company culture.
If Lululemon were to truly resist capitalism and opt instead for one of the other alternatives – socialism, communism, or something in the middle – then it has to walk the walk. That means cutting the price of those leggings down to about $10 for all of the comrades who wish to wear them. And if we base it on the real-world performance of socialism or communism, then all the leggings would eventually be produced in the same color (probably a drab gray) and close to impossible to get.
For anyone who enjoyed trying to find toilet paper in the grocery store last March, there’s what they could expect in a socialist/communist system on a permanent basis.
It was fun to watch the social media pushback on Lululemon, and the company did respond by saying that the workshop it touted wasn’t an official company event and didn’t reflect its views.
Which raises the question: Why promote it then? We suspect it was some super-woke individual, likely fresh out of college, who took it upon herself to plug the workshop on the company’s behalf. But it just reinforces our point: Walk the walk, from top to bottom.