They make some great clothes but their marketing approach isn’t so good…
Picture the scene. You’re a well known American fashion brand and you’ve just launched your new Spring 2011 collection.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world there is serious unrest in Egypt with people dying for their beliefs.
The social networking site Twitter was full of comments and updates about the situation in Cairo. For those of you not familiar with Twitter, posts on the site can be preceded with a hashtag so that people can easily search for a particular item.
The #Cairo hashtag was being used on Twitter to report from the troubling events in Egypt.
Somebody from the fashion brand Kenneth Cole came up with the idea of hijacking the #Cairo hashtag to promote their new fashion collection. Their inappropriate Tweet is shown below.
Guerrilla marketing can be very successful. Our earlier posts on the Bavaria girls and the Hugo Boss yacht for example identify guerrilla marketing tactics that can work.
Kenneth Cole’s highjacking of the #Cairo hashtag though received large scale condemnation and probably hasn’t done the brand too many favours.
They subsequently removed the Tweet and issued an apology.
