How to pay three million dollars in order to lose a billion customers

The super bowl is a true spectacle. This year over 110 million Americans tuned in to watch the super bowl. With such an outstanding audience, a typical 30-second ad spot went for roughly 2.8 million dollars. One ad that has been making waves is the Groupon ad that featured Tibet. When I watched the ad live, the pure shock value at first struck me as brilliant. No publicity is bad publicity right? Wrong. Groupon has caught a lot of flak from both sides of the Tibet issue for their advertisement. Tibetan activists hate the ad because they say it treats the Tibet issue too lightly, and pro-China supporters hate the ad for even mentioning the subject of Tibet. However, the whole controversy has brought up some interesting aspects of current Chinese society as well as the growing relationship between U.S. companies and the Chinese marketplace. Namely that U.S. companies who want to enter the lucrative and fast growing Chinese marketplace need to think very carefully about the importance of business versus a desire to equivocate their own personal political beliefs.
The reaction of Chinese people to the Groupon ad, as garnered by Chinese internet user’s reactions, was very surprising to me. The fact that everyday Chinese citizens were upset with the ad definitely highlights a very interesting difference in perception of the Tibet issue between Americans and Chinese citizens. People firmly believe Tibet to be an integral part of China, and frankly, it will likely always remain that way. These citizens feel the same way that an American citizen would likely feel if a foreign company made an ad criticizing the U.S.’s annexation of Hawaii.

However, I am not advocating that people do nothing about Tibet or Tibetan culture. Instead, I am commenting about a tasteless ad and how it represents important limitations to America’s soft power. Some of the most important ambassadors of America are undoubtedly our businesses and companies. Participating in the global marketplace allows America to project its soft power throughout the world. This is why the brewing matchup between Groupon and the Chinese people will be one that is very interesting.
Groupon has taken a huge risk by running this ad in jeopardizing its ability to expand into the Chinese marketplace; however, it will still take time to see how much damage it has done to its own image in China (as well as how much the company is willing to backtrack in order to attempt to gain business back). Depending on the outcome, this scenario will ultimately dictate how carefully companies tread around political issues in China and how well they balance a desire for profit vs. individual ideology.