Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Mylan and its CEO Heather Bresch are under fire. It raised the price of its EpiPen product — an essential protection for people with life threatening allergies — by a factor of five in the last eight years. Mylan’s statement defending itself clarifies what it’s doing — providing rebates — but evades the main issue of why it increased the price in the first place.

Here’s the dialogue between Mylan and the public, in a nutshell:

Public: Why is this thing so hellishly expensive?

Mylan: We’ll help you afford it with coupons and rebates.

Public: Why is this thing so hellishly expensive?

Mylan: We’re on your side. It’s the insurance regulations.

Public: Why is this thing so hellishly expensive???

RtMylan: We even give some away to schools!S

So Mylan’s position is that it won’t explain the massive price increase on a product where it has a monopoly on a generic medication product that millions of people could die without, a product that’s essentially unchanged from past years....

Back in 2004, media and TV personality Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in jail for obstructing a federal securities investigation.

To pass the time during her incarceration, Stewart did what she does best: cooking and crafts.

Speaking at a Daily Mail brunch session at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Thursday, Stewart said the food inside was around three years past its expiry date.

"That's why I made jam out of the crab apples on the trees," she added.

Aside from making jam, Stewart also turned her hand to ceramics. As a child she'd go to ceramic classes at the weekend, so she quickly signed up to a ceramics class in prison too, at a place called Alderson....

Sometimes the smartest brands use content marketing in a remarkably dangerous and stupid way. Case in point: Coca Cola's recent sneaky gambit, employing nutritionist bloggers to sell the iconic soft drink as a heart-smart snack.
Last month, nutritionists paid by the beverage mega-giant were touting mini-cans of Coke as a healthy snack option in online columns, radio commentary and print. Making the whole thing particularly odious, this paid content was insinuated into stories about February's Heart Health and Black History Month. 

Without shame, the world's largest beverage company has admitted to paying to push mini-cans of Coke as a part of a healthy diet, arguing the marketing ploy is simply a version of “product placement.” A  Coca-Cola spokesman told the Associated Press that the semi-stealth effort was what virtually all brands do to shine a positive light on their respective products....