Always The Bridesmaid, Never the Bride? Maybe It's Because You're Fat.

Update, April 22: The brand development director at Slim-Fast emailed with an apology. Thank you to everyone who spoke out against this type of marketing. Here is an excerpt from the email:

We value feedback from key influencers such as yourself and everyone else who has participated in the dialogue. Given the nature of the ongoing conversation around our recent communications we wanted to reach out. We celebrate brides and certainly did not mean to offend anyone; if we did so, we are truly sorry.

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There are many royal wedding promos going around, some cute and some downright bizarre. For the ones that are a bit of a stretch, my line of thinking has generally been, "that's a bit tacky and out of touch with weddings today, but if someone wants to spend money on a tchotchke I don't personally care for, more power to them."

Slim-Fast's recent wedding campaign, however, crossed a line. It is not only tacky, it is offensive. Here's a look at a few of the many things they did wrong:

First, they broke the cardinal rule of wedding marketing: Never tell a bride she's not good enough exactly as she is.

This also applies to grooms, but I'll be using the term brides for this post since that is who Slim-Fast is targeting with this campaign. They make no mention of men who may want to get in shape. Their entire campaign comes across not only as sexist but misogynistic. Strike number two.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride? Maybe it's because you're ginormous. A colleague emailed me this:

I went to their page and there was another one that really got me – about needing to get into shape to catch the bouquet so drink slimfast. Because bridesmaids are clearly single because they are so fat and out of shape they are not capable of lifting one arm for 4 seconds in the air to catch flowers that they need slimfast to help secure them their future husband.

God forbid your bridal party is immortalized in your photo album forever without being supermodel worthy! Now, I obviously have nothing against getting hair and makeup done for a wedding. Getting hair and makeup done is fun. It's fun to bond with your girlfriends while getting pampered and it's fun to feel a bit glamorous. Slim-Fast should have focused on these positive reasons rather than insinuating that the bridesmaids were all ugly and not worthy of a photo album without a little help.

To make matters worse, Slim-Fast employed an ill-advised social media campaign to help get this message out. Here are some of their mis-steps:

1. Their tweets probably would have never popped up on my radar except that they bought the "promoted tweet" spot in the Royal Wedding's official hashtag stream (#rw2011), meaning that their tweets showed at the top of that stream. The particular tweet I saw wasn't offensive, but was out of touch with today's wedding market, so I clicked on their page to see what their perspective on weddings was.

2. They had no one monitoring their Twitter page yesterday, so when I and several other people tweeted about them, they had no immediate recourse to fix things. Several thousand people who saw those tweets, who may have had no opinion on Slim-Fast before, now have a negative opinion of them. In social media, a plan for reputation management needs to be in place ahead of time and needs to have the ability to be executed immediately.

3. This morning, they deleted the tweets they thought may have been offensive (left the bridesmaid one up though!). Instead of owning up to the problem, they pretended it never happened. This tactic may work in traditional media but it does not work in social media. Pretending a conversation never happened in social media always makes people more angry, not less. The Internet is forever: several people got screenshots (like the ones above) before they were deleted.

If it sounds like I'm angry, it's because I am. Creating a marketing campaign that focuses on a bride's insecurities and tells her she is not good enough just as she is is disgusting. I have nothing against being healthy. I have nothing against wanting to lose weight. I have nothing against wanting to look and feel your best. I do have something against an entire promotion created to make a bride feel worse about herself.

I had an eating disorder for 15 years. I've personally worked with brides who developed eating disorders because of their wedding. I have colleagues who have worked with brides who ended up in the emergency room on the morning of their wedding because of last-minute diet tactics gone horribly wrong. I don't think Slim-Fast advocates any of these practices, obviously, but the "you're not good enough" messages their wedding marketing campaign suggests and the similar messages that society sends have the potential to do real damage. Brides have enough emotional pressures when it comes to planning a wedding. Slim-Fast could have developed a campaign that celebrates brides and healthy habits, and it would have been much better received. They chose to mock them instead and are not apologizing for it.