Another week and another brilliant PR stunt – this time it was the Bodyform Facebook page that earlier received a post from a guy called Richard complaining about periods in the following manner:

Hi , as a man I must ask why you have lied to us for all these years . As a child I watched your advertisements with interest as to how at this wonderful time of the month that the female gets to enjoy so many things ,I felt a little jealous. I mean bike riding , rollercoasters, dancing, parachuting, why couldn’t I get to enjoy this time of joy and ‘blue water’ and wings !! Dam my penis!! Then I got a girlfriend, was so happy and couldn’t wait for this joyous adventurous time of the month to happen …..you lied !! There was no joy , no extreme sports , no blue water spilling over wings and no rocking soundtrack oh no no no. Instead I had to fight against every male urge I had to resist screaming wooaaahhhhh bodddyyyyyyfooorrrmmm bodyformed for youuuuuuu as my lady changed from the loving , gentle, normal skin coloured lady to the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin. Thanks for setting me up for a fall bodyform , you crafty bugger

This post on the Facebook page received more than 86K likes and more than 3,600 comments in under 24 hours. Rather than panicking the marketing team at Bodyform spotted a PR opportunity and decided to create a spoof video explaining why they portray periods in this manner. Here is how they introduced the video:

Hi Richard. We loved your post on our Facebook page. We are always grateful for input from our users, but your comment was particularly poignant. If Facebook had a “love” button, we’d have clicked it. But it doesn’t. So we’ve made you a video instead. Unfortunately, Bodyform doesn’t have a CEO. But if it did, she’d be called Caroline Williams. And she’d say this.

Do let us know if we can help you further…

Regards,

The Bodyform Team

Fart consultant: Mike Koenig

The way this video has been scripted and delivered is perfectly balanced for the online audience, it is nothing short of genius work and even better it has already achieved widespread national and international coverage. The fact the PR team spotted an opportunity and reacted so swiftly is why this has worked so well. We all love clients that will do stuff for fun.

Some of the comments on the post are rather amusing and the majority of people seem to have enjoyed the fact that a brand has responded in a fun and friendly manner. The fact that the CEO appears to (played by an actress) respond openly, apologising in a trustworthy manner actually starts to make Richard look a little daft. Having said that I would imagine Richard is quite proud of himself having his own campaign created – we won’t mention plants and take this one at face value.

Well done to all those involved in this – a great little campaign that made a splash.

About Chris Norton

Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.