Social Listening: Stanley Cups

For my brand this week I chose Stanley Cups. If you don't know, Stanley Cups are a brand of large, metal water cups usually marketed to an outdoorsy audience that have been going viral in recent months among a much younger audience on social media like TikTok. However, it was revealed on January 26th that Stanley Cups use lead in their manufacturing process. This lead is in every Stanley Cup hiding just beneath the stainless steel, "but the product needs to become damaged in order to expose the lead", says Stanley Cup. This means one bad drop of this water cup could have you drinking lead, a prospect social media is none too happy about. 

To make things worse, Stanley Cup's value proposition is about delivering large, sturdy, environmentally friendly, and stylish cups to its customers that will last them years. Including lead in their "environmentally friendly" product is quite the scandal, and for a product who's value proposition is closely related to it's ability to take drops and falls like a champ, I'd be quite scared to drink out of one now if I did drop it.

This is also pointed out by @SatyamInsights on Twitter/X. How can a product be both designed for outdoor adventures but be holding lead within it under the hope that you do not drop the cup hard enough to release it into your drinking water? 

Twitter user @thetchuck goes on to point out how there are plenty of other cups doing the same thing Stanley Cup is doing, with brands like Hydroflash or Yeti, but without including lead in their cups. I'm kind of baffled as to how Stanley Cup couldn't figure out how to make a metal water cup without lead in it when I can go on Amazon and find 50 in two minutes. It's not a hard feat to obtain.

Most of the comments on Twitter/X are similar to the above by @oncloud_e above, making jokes of the situation. 

The brand has yet to make any further comment on the matter and it is not mentioned anywhere on their twitter page @StanleyBrand where they promote their cup line. The account is still actively replying to other tweets complaining about product damage and the likes but is staying away from anything involving this lead incident. While it is a scummy thing to do to try and hide that your customers may be drinking lead, it is probably best for the company to make as little light of the situation as possible, especially on social media platforms where many of the younger generations get their news. They are focused on damage control and trying to keep this news from making real headlines and getting out to the masses.

If I was the brand manager I would do the same thing, not acknowledge it at all until there's enough outrage or backlash to do so. Drawing more light onto this would only make it worse as right now it's not really trending or blowing up. At that's really what I learned from this blog post as well, that sometimes doing nothing and pretending like everything is fine is the best thing you can do.