Last week (May 24, 2008), Dunkin Donuts pulled an ad of its website featuring the celebrity chef Rachael Ray holding a cup of the company’s iced coffee while wearing a black-and-white fringed scarf after attacks from conservative bloggers likened the scarf to the type typically worn by Muslim extremists and calling it “jihadi chic keffiyeh”.
Dunkin Donuts responded quickly but the story spread rapidly, reportedly attracting hundreds of comments on blogs such as Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs.
Online usage data can offer useful insight to marketers to measure the impact of such an incident on a brand. Telephone survey results are expensive and typically quite out of date and customer feedback is unreliable because you may only be hearing from the squeaky wheel.
To measure the impact of this incident on the Dunkin Donuts brand, I first looked at website visits. Did we see an increase in traffic from people looking for the ad or making comments to Dunkin Donuts? Share of US Internet visits to DunkinDonuts.com were up 13% week on week. However, looking back further, we see that two weeks ago the site had a much bigger spike as a result of Free Iced Coffee Day. Also, as illustrated in the following chart last week’s spike was not out of the ordinary compared with previous weeks.

I then looked at search data. I looked at two metrics – the share of US Internet searches for “dunkin donuts” and the keywords used in searches that included the word “dunkin”.
The share of US Internet searches for “dunkin donuts” followed a similar path as visits to the site. On the Search Term Suggestions I found some interesting points. We captured 81 unique search terms with the word “dunkin” in it last week from our sample of more than 10 million US Internet users. Among those 81, 14 referenced the Rachel Ray ad. The highest volume term related to the ad was “rachel ray dunkin donuts”. The following table lists the top 10 terms.
Search Term Suggestions for “dunkin”. Week to 31st May 2008

Query content is a great metric to use to measure brand association. It gives you up to date data on what consumers associate most strongly with your brand – be that nutritional information, recalls, promotions or special offers.
It appears that the incident did affect the Dunkin Donuts brand, though certainly didn’t overshadow all other associations. The timely response from Dunkin Donuts was in order and may even have stemmed further reaction. Whether or not you agree with the decision to remove the ad, a response was required to counter spiraling reactions online.