Scandalous Facts About PR Disasters
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently".—Warren Buffet
Sometimes a company or an organization sees a chance to increase the spotlight on themselves or profit from an opportunity.
While these risks sometimes pay off, there are so many other stories of an incident which can only be described as a PR disaster.
These events lead to outrage, scandal, or simple embarrassment, and the consequences have varied in size based on the faux-pas.
Enjoy this list of moments which had people scratching their heads and wondering how anyone could ever have thought they were good ideas.
1. For the Kids!
Supermarket activity books have always provided a handy bit of fun for the kids to enjoy, including their word searches. However, one particular word search that appeared in a Woolworths activity book came under fire when a certain, not-so-PG four-letter word was discovered smack dab in the middle of the puzzle. In Woolworths' defense, the word search had been filled in by a random letter generator, but you know what they say—put a million random letter generators at a million typewriters and eventually they'll spell out the F word.
2. We Need to Buy a Lottery Ticket
Random letter and number generators haven’t just limited their unpredictable mischief to supermarket hijinks. Delta Airlines was red in the face when a passenger looked at his confirmation slip and realized that the code read “H8GAYS". Oops.
3. We Voted Down ‘Illuminati’
Chocolate company Italo-Suisse waited nearly a full century before changing their name in 2014, given that they were neither Italian or Swiss anymore. Somehow, they decided on the name ISIS. Again, in 2014. The company suffered huge sales falls when people refused to buy chocolates which shared a name with a known terrorist group. They’re now known as Libeert, named after the family which owns the company.
4. We Had a Battle There? When?
Behind Taco Bell and KFC is the company known as Yum Brands. In 2014, they decided to open a new Vietnamese-style sandwich shop in Dallas called "Banh Shop." They decorated the eatery with a red star, which they somehow didn’t realize was the symbol of the Vietnamese Communist party, which had taken over North Vietnam, unified the country under themselves, and had driven thousands of Vietnamese to flee abroad. Those refugees and their relatives who found out about Banh Shop had a fairly negative response to Yum Brands' tone-deaf symbol choice (no doubt Ho Chi Minh would have appreciated it though).
