Since the whirlwind of activity that resulted in McNeil Laboratories pulling a Motrin ad campaign and issuing an apology, a chorus of naysaying has emerged that downplays the significance of the events. Some of these opinions make good points while others are just downright silly. Ultimately, though, what occurred between the brand and the mommy bloggers who launched the offensive against it is significant.

The arguments against it fall into four camps:

The mommy bloggers who were offended were dopes who are unable to laugh at themselves.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t get why some people were offended. Other people probably don’t understand why you’re offended by some things that offend you. If you’re not able to put yourselves in somebody else’s shoes and perceive the world through their eyes, you need to find a job doing something other than marketing or PR.

One of the fundamental skills of anybody working in communications is “boundary spanning.” At least, that’s what the PR academics call it. The following is from “Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management.”

The dominant coalition needs information to help make decisions. That information frequently is provided by boundary spanners, individuals within the organization who frequently interact with the organization’s environment and who gather, select, and relay information from the environment to decision makers in the dominant coalition. Communication managers and public relations practitioners are among an organization’s designated boundary spanners.

Boundary spanning, which organizations need, is kinda the opposite of dismissing a population in your environment because you think they’re stupid.

Nobody got offended until one person Twittered her objection to the ad. Everybody else just piled on. Without the original tweet to kick things off, the ad would have gone unnoticed.

So what? That’s how these things work. It’s how they’ve since long before Twitter, the Web, even email. We’re social creatures (which does, after all, help explain the rise of social media) and we like to express our opinions to others. An ad is never viewed in a vacuum by everybody who sees it; we’re always biased when a friend says, “Have you seen that offensive TV commercial?” When I had a few drinks with him earlier this year, advertising exec John January told me there’s always been a feedback loop in advertising: People who don’t like your ad will let you know, and always have, even when it meant sending a letter.

For all the uproar, McNeil’s bottom line won’t suffer.

True, but that’s because McNeil responded. It would be different if the company had dismissed the objections and continued to offer the video or, worse, followed it up with another one that struck the same nerve. Eventually, a lot of people would have found it a simple matter to express their dissatisfaction by switching to Advil.

Mommy bloggers aren’t representative of Motrin’s consumer target.

I’m not sure this is true to begin with—I haven’t seen any studies that compares the values of mommy bloggers to mothers in general—but even assuming it is true, mommy bloggers do wield a certain amount of influence over those who read their content. And if reaching out to influencers is a good idea, it must also mean that pissing them off is a bad idea.

But putting these arguments aside, and recognizing that the whole case study will probably end up nothng more than a footnote in the history of business engagement in the online world, there are still valuable lessons to take away from the MotrinMoms experience:

1. A lot of people outside the U.S. had never heard of Motrin before this dust-up. Now they know it as the brand that insulted mothers. Even brands never get a second chance to make a first impression.
2. Among the top 10 Google results for “Motrin” are a blog post about MotrinMoms and one of the parody commercials uploaded to YouTube. The record of this story will live on for decades, discoverable by anybody searching the brand name.
3. Over 1,300 people have joined Facebook group titled, “Babywearing isn’t painful. Boycott Motrin for saying it is.” One comment posted to the wall: “Joining this group was the easiest part of my day. Not only do I believe in (and practice) babywearing, but Motrin does not do an effective job of pain relief for me (AKA I have been “boycotting” it for years).” That’s more bad word of mouth the company could have avoided.

McNeil does seem to be serious about learning from the experience. The original apology posted to the website was a graphic. I read a few criticisms of that approach, and now the follow-up to the original message is text that can be copied and pasted. The mere fact that there is a follow-up post suggests that McNeil (or at least Marketing VP Kathy Widmer) is moving up the learning curve pretty fast:

We are listening to you, and we know that’s the best place to start as we move ahead. More to come on that.

In the end, we have been reminded of age-old lessons that are tried and true:

When you make a mistake - own up to it, and say you???re sorry.
Learn from that mistake.

Ultimately, the reason Motrin sales won’t suffer is that the MotrinMoms episode was pivotal for McNeil. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them hosting a group of mommy bloggers for a summit, as GM and other companies have done. It wouldn’t be the first company to build a reputation for its commitment to real conversation with audiences from the ashes of an earlier reputation for lousy communication; think Dell and Sun.

So I’m not so quick to shrug off the incident. There are useful lessons to be drawn from it.