9. Epicurious Follow The Grand Tradition Of Tragedy Marketing
The time immediately following a tragedy will invariably inspire a number of social media response types. There are the awful idiots who post memes inviting people to Share to show respect, and the attention-seeking jokers who will invariably get kicked out of their accounts a few hours later after a barrage of reports about their inappropriate status/Tweet, and then there are the brands who unthinkably try to benefit. Piggy-backing on trending topics is a questionable enough marketing ethic, but using a tragic event to attempt to channel some of the collective outpouring of grief into sales is downright despicable, as Epicurious discovered when they tried to market on the back of the Boston bombing.
That's what the world needed at that moment of crisis, breakfast cereal and scones. They aren't the first either - and probably won't be the last - KMart used the Newtown shooting as the perfect opportunity to tweet about one of their key offers...
And Kenneth Cole belittled an entire nation by devaluing the Cairo uprising with one supremely callous marketweet...
