Marketing is most often done actively, intentionally in the form of ad campaigns and strategies. When executed actively, there is more of a sense of control by a company…. Sometimes the marketing of a company happens passively such as dealing with an oversight which gets legs with the press. A company may be dealing with a customer service issue or worse a crisis, and how companies deal with these situations is ultimately how they are judged by their customers and potential customers. With the internet serving up instant feedback, lots of damage can happen in a hurry. Not purely a negative thing, instant feedback works both ways, even company to consumer and misunderstandings can be quelled much faster.
spray painting wedding gowns prior to their demise
When a bridal boutique closed, workers sprayed red spray paint on the wedding gowns before throwing them away. This oversight turned into a marketing uproar, and several groups have voiced their disgust at the company for the wanton waste of usable dresses. The parent company disputes this and stated the dresses were unsaleable….. With the economy, demand of the market could find a place to sell or donate some, maybe all of the dresses. And who wouldn’t buy a $5 wedding dress? Five bucks is five bucks. They didn’t make any money by tossing them out. If anything, they lost money on the whole thing through spray paint, time and labor. And might lose potential sales once the dust settles with the public, depending if consumers are appeased by how the company handled the situation.
The wedding gown is arguably the most important detail at a wedding. So expensive, so coveted, the wedding dress can make or break the event. All eyes are on the bride. If another woman wears white to a wedding, there will be scandal. It’s the bride’s fairytale day to shine, and the wedding gown is the means to putting the bride on a pedestal and keeping her in the spotlight. Getting the perfect dress is paramount, some brides even go to the lengths of tanning and dieting to look even better on that special day.
Everyone knows how important the dress is. The perfect gown is for the perfect day. A wedding dress can become perfect if it’s the right price. Several organizations are available to assist brides-to-be in finding cost effective alternatives to a regular high-priced gown. These organizations protested the loudest, as they have a market to sell dresses cheaply and help brides-to-be at the same time.
Another way the company could have marketed the closing of the shop is donating the dresses, or having a huge sale. They might have sold out of gowns and turned people away, but we’ll never know. By turning it into positive press to build anticipation, instead of a sad event of losing jobs and a location to buy wedding dresses. The outraged parties will say nothing was wrong with the dresses. The parent company will disagree. If they are worth something, why not discount or donate? If they just threw them away, women would go into the dumpsters. They sprayed them so no one could use them once discarded, and taking the choice out of the equation is why the public was so critical.
source and image credit:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45875675/ns/today-weddings/#.TwT6nkqKV_k
