What Marketers Shall Never Do

New York Times ran an interesting article today about Reese Witherspoon’s Fashion Line offered free dresses to teachers and failing miserably to deliver. The company reserved just 250 dresses for this PR stunt, but the implication of the marketing campaign was that every applying teacher would get a dress to cheer them up in these difficult times. Apparently, because of the power of Reese Witherspon’s brand, over 1 Million teachers applied, which involved not only attesting to their profession with an .edu email, but also making the teachers upload two pictures of their IDs.

Times estimated that the company would need $40 Million to deliver onto their promise of free dresses to all the applicants. $40 Million is a lot of money, but it’s something one would expect a celebrity either to have or at the very least to know people who can contribute to make teachers happy. Would be amazing for the teachers, amazing for the company and their brand.

Since this is something that wasn’t done, the question is if bad PR is good PR in the long run. What if teachers were not the primary audience for the company anyway? But, with so much publicity, so much traffic to their website, so many new people signed up for their email marketing program, and yes, so many good powerful links from juicy domains, one could claim this as a win even if teachers were made suckers in time of a pandemic crisis.