Bad Pork PR
Great post from the Church of the Customer blog about how the US National Pork Board shoved out a cease and desist letter to a breast-feeding activist who was parodying their ad campaign “Pork: the other white meat” with “the other white milk”.
Unfortunately Jennifer Laycock (the activist) has a strong social network who she encouraged to spread the bad word about the Pork Board’s heavy-handed tactics. It worked and the CEO apologised and relented.
A little while ago it was easy for big companies to show their might whether they were right or wrong and let the lawyers fire off standard letters to scare consumers. The shift now is that size no longer matters, distribution does. Would you change the way you talk to your consumers/listeners/readers/viewers if when they talked back they were much louder than you?