This month, we look at coffee, planes, shopping and…bum parties?! Would you like corporation tax with that? Starbucks found itself in hot water this November (along with Amazon and Google), after the companies were invited to be grilled by the Public Accounts Committee about their corporation tax payments (or lack thereof). Now, many arguments have [...]
October saw two great examples of what brands should, and should not do when responding to fans on social media. Show some personality or resort to corporate drone mode? Let’s see which tactic has been the most successful. Bodyform: #winning I can’t be the only one who, at some point, has wanted to chuck a [...]
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 [...]
July was a monumental month of failure, with brands tripping over themselves to dis-please. Over in the UK we had the pleasure of Barclays, and its Facebook campaign featuring hapless Dan clashing mightily with its rate adjustment scandal. Then there’s fashion site Celeb Boutique not checking hashtags before tweeting, and therefore thinking that when #Aurora [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
This month we bring you a selection of international failure. One thing that we try to emphasis in our social media crisis training is that brands cannot isolate offline events from spreading to the virtual realm. It just takes one funny picture, one careless sentence in an interview or one bad business decision – soon [...]
