The horsemeat scandal isn’t really about food safety, it’s about trust. How can people trust the food that they’re eating? How can the brands involved reassure consumers that they’re taking the issue seriously and doing everything in their power to ensure the safety and quality of their food? Tesco and Waitrose have both promised changes [...]
There’s a great Storify by Tia Fisher of eModeration (www.emoderation.com) that takes you through the social media crisis simulation we ran last week, which I’ve embedded below. [View the story "Social media crisis simulation workshop " on Storify]
An Unexpected Journey Ah, Apple. How I love your shiny, money-burning gadgets. How I fervently covert all the iPads and the MacBooks that I see flashed around by the cool crowd who are probably even now wondering, did she just make a Hobbit reference in this blog post? Yes. Yes I did. Anyway, über cool [...]
There must have been something in the water this August. Brands near and far were tripping over themselves be accused of sexism. Maybe some witnessed the brief national and social media anger that erupted over the Madhouse trousers back in March. I can just imagine someone chewing on the end of their cigar, thinking “I’ll [...]
Clearly, I’ve missed out on some big language revolution here. Do grown women really use words like FrooFroo, noonoo and lala when talking about their genitalia? Femfresh seems to think so. Now, personally, I don’t find the brand’s choice of language offensive, I just think it’s a bit stupid. I did, however, find some of [...]
Kentucky Fried Chicken is no stranger to reputation crises. Search for KFC on Google and the first page brings back some worrying recent results. First there’s the story of KFC challenging the order to pay compensation to an Australian girl that had suffered brain damage caused by salmonella poisoning (the article claims that sometimes staff [...]
Brands can never be completely sure of avoiding crisis situations. There are too many variables. Human error, fallibility, corruption, ambition and rivalries can cause considerable damage to a brand’s reputation and sometimes no amount of procedure can prevent this from happening. But the brand can control its response to the evolving situation. It can make [...]
You would think that common sense and decency would kick in here and that no brand would even dream of using a national disaster or traumatic event of any kind to promote its product – especially if said product was completely useless when it comes to responding to the problem at hand. However, you would [...]
