Is Spring Energy Becoming the Theranos of Energy Gel?

Spring Energy offers a valuable lesson: brands are built slowly, but eroded quickly, underscoring the importance of a swift and effective crisis communications approach up your sleeve

Who will love this

• Crisis PR consultants

• Trail runners looking for a scapegoat for sub-par race times between the years of 2021 and 2024

• Scott Galloway (who loves his 3 point crisis comms approach)

Today

Good morning 🫡

We all like to think our brands will only be covered positively and that crisis comms are for other brands. Today’s brand is a lesson in what NOT to do in a crisis. I’m also including my favorite framework for crisis comms in case you find yourself having to issue a brand apology (no shame, and no shade: I’ve been there, too).

Shoutout to my boyfriend Tristan who tipped me off to this story 🖤 (love a hot tip!)!

Today’s newsletter also asks something of YOU, dear reader. Because there are a lot of smart brand builders in this newsletter, I thought it’d be fun to open the floor to you and hear what you’d do in this scenario. If people participate, I’ll round up a summary of your recommendations and publish it in next week’s newsletter. 

Brand studios and brand builders talk a love about how brands are built (slowly, over time) but we tend to avoid talking about how to respond when you find yourself in hot water.

My hope is that this newsletter is like the Virgin Atlantic in-flight safety video I watched last week: entertaining and instructive, but not something you actually have to use.

Let’s get into it.

Amanda

⌚️ Estimated read time: 5 minutes.

📣 Community shoutout 📣

Before we dive in, let’s roll the credits real quick. Big gratitude to the lovely:

• Benny Wallington, who kindly shouted out this newsletter 📰 on Linkedin 🙏

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Readers who sent me London recommendations! I wish I could have stayed another week!

• ↩️ Replies to my newsletter & chitchats throughout the week - it’s so fun to hear what you are enjoying reading and what you’re working on.

OK! Without further ado…a brand in crisis.

How Spring Energy’s Brand was Damaged with Mislabelled Products and a Poor Apology

Spring Energy are an energy gel for runners. There’s lots of energy gels on the market, but Spring Energy promote their whole foods approach (gels made from organic basmati rice, apple juice, yams, maple syrup  vs straight up sugar, like Gu). 

This is a big selling point for ultra runners, who are often on their feet for over 12 hours and distances of 50K+. Getting your nutrition wrong at distances like this can spell disaster or DNF (runner-talk for ‘did not finish’). Don’t ask me how I know…

They’re also really expensive, at $4.20 a pop. Assuming a runner needs 60-90g of carbs an hour and they plan on being on course for 8 hours, a fueling strategy using nothing but Spring Energy gels would run you ~ $64. Most people will eat other food along with gels but that gives you a sense of how expensive this product is, which is why people have been absolutely up in arms since finding out that their products may only contain one third of the labelled carbs and calories. 😱

Apparently there’s been chatter on running forums for years doubting the validity of the reported nutritional content of Spring Energy gels. But recently, it got real:

• In April, a Redditor posts about conducting a simple test in a lab and determines that Spring Energy’s flagship Awesome Sauce has less than half of the labelled carbohydrates and calories. Other Redditors respond in the comments with similar results.

• May 3 - A GoFundMe is set up to fund the testing of Spring Energy Awesome Sauce, Canterbury, and gels from 7 other brands. 110 people donated $2805 to the fund. They found the Spring Energy products to have less than 50% of the listed calories and 30% of listed carbohydrates.

• May 28 - Jason Koop, ultrarunner and coach and podcaster, reports the results of independent lab tests he commissioned, which showed that his sample contained 18g of carbohydrates as opposed to the advertised 45g.

• May 29 - The founder of Spring Energy posts a Instagram video and turns off comments on all Instagram videos (the former community manager in me is screaming rn)

Here’s the full transcript of what he said: 

I am Rafal Nazarewicz. I am one of the founders of Spring Energy. I am athlete by myself and I perfectly understand the importance of sports nutrition. I started this company to help athletes. We’ve gained your trust and we became a part of the running community. We greatly appreciate that. Without you, Spring wouldn’t exist. In the wake of the current events, we took some time to test extensively our products, our processes and our ingredients. We identified some weak spots. We realize that we may have manufactured some batches that had lower than the desired nutritional value. We apologise for that. It wasn’t a malicious act. We are going to introduce a lot of changes. We are going to reformulate Awesome Sauce. It will have new ingredients which will stabilize its nutritional value. We are introducing changes to our manufacturing. We will also revise the sources of our ingredients to make sure that the value of those nutritional ingredients is stable. We manufacture in small batches and this production is sensitive to…(video is cut off)

Things I don't love about this statement: 

• ❌ Not taking accountability for the issue

• ❌ Comments turned off

• ❌ No exact timeline for the next update

• 🤔 ‘We’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here

There’s a lot missing from this statement: an actual apology, a real explanation. I’m genuinely scratching my head: how can they have gotten it so wrong? If they simply didn’t ever get the product tested by an external lab, I’d love to see them say that. If they found out about the discrepancy and were making changes but hadn’t yet rolled them out, I’d like to see them say that (and apologize, obviously).

But let’s pause for a second and talk about what good in a brand crisis looks like.

Three Steps to Effective Crisis Management

Brands are built slowly and over time, but they can be toppled overnight. 

That doesn’t mean that one misstep puts you out of business - but it can, and should be taken seriously. I come from the Scott Galloway school of thought, which says effective crisis management should tick the following boxes: 

1. Acknowledge the issue

2. Top guy/gal takes responsibility

3. Overcorrect

Does Spring Energy’s fit the bill?

1. ❌ Acknowledge the issue

2. 🤔 Top guy/gal takes responsibility

3.  ❌ Overcorrect

I give it a 0.5/3. The apology is mealymouthed and doesn’t properly acknowledge the issue (We identified some weak spots). It’s the corporate apology version of “I’m sorry you feel that way.” The founder is the top guy, but I think it’s a stretch to say he’s taking responsibility - in fact, I read his apology as not taking responsibility. There’s an apology in there, but it’s not really clear what it’s for. As for overcorrecting, reformulating is not overcorrecting - it’s doing what they should have done in the first place.

Your turn: What Would You Do?

Spring Energy is in some very hot water, and that position has only been exacerbated by how they handled the crisis.

I want to know if you were advising Spring Energy, what you recommend in this instance in order to protect the brand and business. Is there hope? Are they toast? What would save this brand and business? Think big. To recap 👇

What we know:

• Spring Energy retailers like The Feed are already selling the product at 50% off

• Spring Energy have issued one video, one email to customers, and have turned off comments on social media

• Spring Energy are supplying nutrition for some of the biggest ultra races on the calendar like Broken Arrow and Hardrock100

• GU are already circling, making comments on social media - poised to pick up Spring Energy’s disillusioned customers

Assumptions: 

• Spring Energy’s entire supply is mislabeled 

• Spring Energy doesn’t have the cash to fund the replacement of all products that have incorrectly labeled nutrition

How to play: 

• Hit reply to this email & tell me what you’d recommend if you were advising Spring Energy

I’ll do a round up of your advice in next week’s newsletter.

Stay outta hot water,

Amanda ✌️

👀 Brand Scoops Catching My Eye this Week

• Starbucks is launching a film studio to “deepen connections and spark conversations”

• On x Zendaya’s ad makes running look so damn cool. Choreography is underutilized in creative work, IMO

• This eyecatching outdoor work for BPM Supreme (tools for DJs)

• Cute photography for Darn Tough Vermont’s first brand campaign

• This England Til I Died campaign from Saatchi’s for the British Heart Foundation using the language of football fandoms to draw attention to heart disease in young people 💔

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