The Green Happiness Diet Under Attack

The Green Happiness; not so happy anymore!

The Green Happiness is a popular diet created by two girls, foodbloggers, to help people to get healthier and lose weight by changing their food intake.

After an interview with the two girls behind the Green Happiness in the NRC was published, many nutritionists, foodbloggers, organizations and The Netherlands Nutrition Centre Foundation (Voedingscentrum) commented on this interview, critized their diet and even made fun of them. The general opinion about the diet among these actors was that the diet is unhealthy and could even be dangerous. The criticism was published by many online but also traditional media.

Online vs Traditional media

A lot of articles with information and opinions about the interview with the Green Happiness ladies were published by many different newspapers. Also a lot of bloggers and people on Twitter wrote a piece about the issue. The following question arises: ‘Did the newspapers influence the bloggers to write something about the issue or was this the other way around? ‘

According to Meraz (2009) the traditional media’s agenda setting power has changed and the power became more divided between traditional media and citizen media. Both different types of media seem to influence each other. So, in this case the traditional media wrote pieces about this issue because blogs were talking about it but also the other way around. Many newspapers also have a blog nowadays which also contributes to the media attention issues get. Because of the influence of both types of media on the other, the created attention for an issue can be enormous. This great amount of content about an issue asks for an appropriate response (Utz, Schultz,& Glocka, 2013). Organizations should prepare themselves to save their reputation and minimize the damage. Can the girls of the Green Happiness manage to control the damage done by this huge amount of criticism?

Restore the happiness

The girls of the Green Happiness did not give an official reaction to all this criticism yet, they only posted a statement on social media which says; they want to thank their followers and will give a reaction within days. They also sent a postcard to the people who already bought one of their earlier books with a discount code for their new book.

In times of crisis, organizations often do not really know what to do and how to respond to an issue. Claeys and Cauberghe (2012) did research in which they investigated how to respond to a crisis and what time strategies are most effective. They found that it is best to use reputation restoring crisis response strategies when there is a severe reputational threat, which is the case in the Green Happiness issue. A reputation restoring crisis response strategy can be a statement containing an apology or denial of the situation. When the organization is highly responsible an apology is advised, otherwise denial can help make the issue go away.  

The medium that will be used to send out a crisis response statement also plays an important role. The research of Utz,Schultz and Glocka (2013) showed that crisis communication via Facebook resulted in a more positive reputation afterward than crisis communication via the traditional media. But they say that even though Facebook creates a more positive reputation, organizations should not neglect traditional ways of crisis communication.

  

About the Autor

Y. Mathot is an individual blogger who is living in Amsterdam, finishing her masters in Persuasive communication at the University of Amsterdam, being passionate about PR and Marketing.