Waitrose suffered a PR meltdown this week. The supermarket chain known for its squeaky clean image took a bit of a dive in the reputation stakes when Greenpeace launched a campaign calling for Waitrose to “Dump Shell”. The campaign’s main objection is that the oil giant has a track record for irresponsible drilling in the Arctic and that Waitrose, as a brand that prides itself on promoting green values, now seems to be jumping into bed with the enemy, namely by placing own-branded cafes at Shell garages across the country.
Environmental campaigners decided to make their feelings heard through the Waitrose Facebook page, commenting on dessert recipe links with their own take on the matter “Where’s the recipe for Baked Alaska?” and “Help, my dessert has gone wrong, the edges of my arctic are melting” were just a choice few. To which Waitrose responded with a resounding “Delete”. Don’t like what someone’s saying about you? Wipe it from the records.
This must have seemed like a quick and easy solution, and a collective sigh of relief probably went up from the Waitrose headquarters as all that bad press was removed with one effortless click. But these things do have a habit of coming back to bite bums, and the response from the commenters was a renewed scattergun approach, doubling their typing efforts to denounce the Waitrose brand. In fact, all the deletions did was to stoke the fire – encouraging ever more Facebook users to weigh in with their tuppence worth.
Did the Lord McAlpine Twitter debacle teach this PR lot nothing? Just as knee-jerk tweeting can come back to haunt you, reactionary deleting is never going to go unnoticed. In an online world where everything is archived you can’t just click your way to a spotless brand reputation.
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