A quick primer from Marketing 101: don’t associate your company with totalitarian regimes. A simple lesson, but one that recently went unheeded in considerable style by a Taiwanese company.
A quick primer from Marketing 101: don’t associate your company
with totalitarian regimes. A simple lesson, but one that recently went
unheeded in considerable style by a Taiwanese company.
The K.E. and Kingstone ad agency decided to pull advertisements for
German-made electric heaters one day after it came under fire from
Jewish and German diplomats in Taiwan.
The posters featured a smiling caricature of Adolf Hitler, replete with
khakis and black boots, his right arm raised high in salute. Above him
was a white space heater and the slogan ’Declare war on the cold
front!’
Marketing manager Huang Chong-Jung said the campaign was never intended
to show support for Hitler. The company merely used the fascist dictator
to emphasize that the heaters were made in Germany, he added. What, they
couldn’t find an Oktoberfest costume?
The German manufacturer of the heaters, DBK, did not know about the ad
campaign and never approved it.
’Now when we do things for the public, we will think about everyone and
from every perspective,’ Huang said. Thanks - and you might want to
reconsider those Idi Amin ads for your Ugandan dishwashers.
