Just as journalists shouldn’t become the story, neither should PR Pros.
Allbirds Inc. makes shoes today; sometime at the end of Q2 or Q3, it will instead operate as a GPU-as-a-service company and transform, phoenix-like, into NewBird AI. That’s right, from tennis shoes to GPUs in under a year. It reads like misinformation, the strategic pivot looks like a 180-degree turn that’s difficult to really understand, but investors are into it: since the announcement, Allbirds Inc. has seen its stock rise 580% from $2.49 on Tuesday to closer to $12 today.
The pivot, which was just announced, hasn’t closed and is highly speculative, but has increased enterprise value overnight. How is this happening? What’s going on? When did tennis shoes start processing data?
Narratives are Key to Understanding This Style of Chaos
A single article in a new news outlet can still create a ripple that becomes a tsunami, but it is no longer just the media that can do that. We’ve talked before about how interest groups form in social communities. It is the pace of interest group formation and message delivery that forms differing narratives related to the same coverage.
The challenge for communicators is to understand those narratives beyond mention counts and word clouds, to find actual meaning and better understand how people are reacting to news before you make a big mistake.
Coming back to Allbirds Inc. and that 580% increase in stock value may be the hype isn’t worth the chase.
As strategic communicators, we’re always on the lookout for ideas and brands that aren’t passing a sniff-test. If something looks too good to be true, it very often is. I didn’t read anywhere that Allbirds Inc. is in the same position as, say, a Japanese toilet company, Toto, that happens to make ceramic tooling that is ideal for GPU production. It’s seen an almost 100% increase in its value, but that feels a lot less speculative.
Allbirds Inc. and its future enterprise, NewBird AI, will need to keep an eye out for copycat comedy posts from other brands. If the beleaguered and non-existent Montreal Expos can do it, so will hundreds of others. If something is funny enough, it will be repeated. Just look at the Narrative and memes formed around the 12 tons of stolen Kitkats.
That sort of comedic negative narrative formation can hurt a brand. Another example of missing the narrative is DoorDash.
Spillover Risks in Engaging in Politics
When a brand chooses to engage a presidential, prime ministerial, or even a mayoral office, the risk of splitting your audience along voting lines is very real. DoorDash’s No Tax on Tips grandma campaign failed to understand this.
If you are going to tangle with a bull, be prepared to be gored. There is no one in the world more polarizing than President Trump. If you weren’t prepared to be polarizing, that’s a big problem.
DoorDash and its beleaguered PR team forgot the narrative at the core of that polarization (the White House and President Trump himself) when one lead began to sub-Tweet folks discussing the issue. After a series of posts on X, some now deleted, it appears that the criticism of others’ criticism became the story. Just as journalists shouldn’t become the story, neither should PR Pros. Battle lines are drawn, audiences are aligned, laughing or outraged.
Instead of No Tax on Tips, the discussion is about PR planning and whether the campaign was authentic enough.
For Allbirds Inc., there’s actually a huge opportunity to become a GPU-as-a-service company. It looks like it has the capitalization to do it, if it can retain that stock value and actually make the investments to grow into a provider of this type. It could also be pecked to death by funny memes or other chicanery, time will tell.
The narratives that form can be predicted and game-planned. Really smart brands predict the outrage and play it off. In DoorDash’s case, it fell into its own trap because it didn’t anticipate the negative vibes. The good news is that in this day and age, a good comedic apology can completely shift a narrative.
If Astronomer can bounce back and see 122% ARR growth, I’m not too worried about DoorDash. Let’s just hope they get creative and find a less polarizing topic to enter, like War or Religion, rather than politics.
