10 Yetis Examples of Good and Bad PR - Friday January 26th 2018

Happy Friday - we hope you’ve had an awesome week. Here to top it all off is today’s good & bad PR...

Good PR

Costa is in the news for all the right reasons today, after announcing that they will fill water bottles for free as part of a new scheme. Considering their bottled water is pretty pricey, creeping towards the £2 mark, this is a really cool move and bound to please the thirsty among us. This will be in place from March, so don’t get rushing down to your local with your bottle just yet, and Premier Inns are another venue that are getting on board.

Another good, though a little crazy, PR story this week is Nutella-gate. A French supermarket, Intermarche, has cut the price of the delicious chocolate spread delight by more than 70%, and shoppers are going cray-cray trying to get their hands on a jar or ten. The media are describing it as a riot, but one supermarket worker went so far as to call the scene in the aisles an ‘orgy’. In terms of drumming up more footfall, the stunt has certainly done that, and reminding us all of a yummy chocolate snack – it’s done that too. Success all round.

The New York-based Gugenheim art museum has shown a solid gold sense of humour this week, after refusing Trump’s request to borrow one of their Van Gogh collection and instead Curator Nancy Spector offered up a gold working toilet created by an Italian artist, Maurizio Cattelan. This work of (f)art is worth over $1million, so it’s no drop in the ocean, but we can’t imagine it quite compares to the Landscape with Snow portrait they were hoping to hang.

Bad PR

If you believe that all publicity is good publicity, then this is surely a PR stunt worth a mention… A recruitment site has posted a job advert for an EA and Investor Relations Assistants. Plus points – it’s worth £40-45k, but the negative – you have to be a pro at handling ‘male banter’ and you must not be ‘distracting’…

This has surely got to be a PR stunt; surely no one in their right mind would request a potential employee to be good at handling male banter. What the hell is male banter? Is it just normal banter, or is there some kind of dark undertone? In the current climate, this is in pretty bad taste, stunt or otherwise.

Bitcoin is still undergoing turbulence this week, as the confidence low continues with reports that Britain is set to impost strict laws on cryptocurrency. The government is concerned about its use by criminals and vows to investigate, but all this controversy and suspicion is not good for business, and the media are watching and waiting for further declines in the value.