Worst Publicity Disasters
Friday, Aug 28, 2020, 7:21 pm
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1.GlaxoSmithKline
This is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, so it is a genuinely jaw dropping event when somebody at the top of the company says that up to 90% of their drugs only work in up to 50% of the people taking them. How can they then feel as if people have confidence in their products with this rather shocking revelation.
2.Verizon
In 2005, the boss of Verizon not only managed to damage the reputation of their products, but he also managed to be abusive about their customers at the same time. First he spoke about their phone not working in the house, but then followed it up by being abusive about his customers and in a round about kind of way called them stupid. Way to go!
3.Barclays
Banks are always guilty of harassing you to take out credit so they can make money, but the chief executive of Barclays bank in the UK made the mistake of abusing one of their very own products. He argued that he would stay away from their credit card because it was so expensive, so what does that tell you when the guy at the top would not even use it?
4.Topman
This UK company suffered after their chief decided to give some abuse to their target market. You wonder what he thought he would achieve by doing this, but you can guarantee that he did not expect their sales to drop by 4.5% as a direct result.
5.Cartoon Network
Cartoon Network decided to do some promotion by posting these rather strange looking symbols around Boston. The only problem was that people thought they were bombs and it led to the police searching the city for them as they had wires hanging out and tape.
6.Department of Defense
This image is actually real and you wonder about the US government actually putting up an image of a plane flying low over this particular city. The fact that this was real and not photoshopped makes it even worse and it was no surprise that they were slated for it by everybody.
7.Kenneth Cole
The uprising in Egypt was a major event in the world. However, Kenneth Cole tried to jump onto this particular bandwagon by claiming it was because they had seen his new products. This was a disaster because people were being killed in riots, so it was seen as being rather insensitive to say the least.
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8.American Apparel
This was absolutely crazy. Basically, this company tried to take advantage of Hurricane Sandy by putting on a special sale in case anybody was a bit bored during the storm. They were seen as being extremely insensitive and quite rightly they ended up losing customers as people were just stunned at how stupid they were being.
9.Susan Boyle
The problem for Susan Boyle was nothing to do with her, but rather a PR department that gave her the hash tag #susanalbumparty because lets face it you are going to read that as something completely different from Susan Album Party. This hash tag was sent to millions of people in a short period of time, so there was no way for it to be covered up by the record company.
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10.Smoking helps?
The company Philip Morris Tobacco amazingly tried to claim that smoking helps the economy in the Czech Republic. Their claim was that because you could die earlier, then you were less of a financial burden on the state as you would not be ill for years and of course they make money from tax.
11.Abercrombie & Fitch
The problem that they had was that they tried to change the type of people that shopped at their stores. To do this they asked a particular star of Jersey Shore to stop wearing their products as they felt he was bringing the wrong people in. The result was their sales dropping by a huge amount.
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12.Gerald Ratner
This was a UK businessman in charge of a massive jewelry company who basically said that even he would not buy their products as they were rubbish. In next to no time the entire company collapsed as people just refused to shop there, so ultimately it was a major PR disaster.
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