Good and Bad PR: EasyJet’s loss is ASOS’s gain

Smart ASOS move

ASOS has been praised this week for its excellent response to some bad press that EasyJet was receiving. In case you haven’t seen it yet, a passenger on a flight bound for Geneva shared a picture online of a row of seats that had the backs removed, with a passenger sat in one of them (obviously not a safe way to fly at all).

EasyJet responded to the tweet by asking the person to remove the photo (not cool) and DM them to take up the issue and has since said that passengers weren’t actually permitted to sit in that row because the seats were awaiting repair.

Either way, it was bad press for EasyJet, not least for the way they handled things on social media. ASOS decided to swoop in and have a bit of fun at EasyJet’s expense on Twitter with the following tweet:

Hey @easyJet we love your funky new backless seats... possible uniform upgrade to compliment? 😉 #EasyJet #BacklessBoarding pic.twitter.com/CGta2PBK4D

— ASOS (@ASOS) 6 August 2019

Comments ranged from ‘10/10 marketing reflex’ and ‘your social media team deserve a medal’ and the tweet has been liked 1.2k times and retweeted over 130 times.

The response even got some media coverage including in Manchester Evening News (with more to potentially come).

Very good, ASOS.

Bad PR

BA system failure

British Airways has disappointed a lot of passengers this week, after an IT glitch meant its online check-in system went down; leading to delays and flight cancellations.

More than 80 flights were cancelled at Heathrow and a further 10 from Gatwick, but over 200 other flights were delayed due to the system failure.

Passengers were being warned to allow extra time when travelling to the airport due to the delays at check-in and BA had to turn to old-school manual systems for the check in process.

British Airways was quickly trending on Twitter, with people taking to the social media platform to get their anger out.

News of the IT glitch and flight chaos spread far and wide and BA was left with a very big headache on its hands.

Ocado diet advice

In other news, Ocado has been criticised for a feature that offers suggestions to online shoppers about which items they could switch for a similar product with lower calories. It goes into detail and tells them how many calories they’d save and what amount of exercise they’d have to do to work that off.

There are concerns that it will trigger those with eating disorders and cause people to worry excessively over how many calories they are consuming. It has been branded irresponsible by journalist and influencer Rebecca Reid, who tweeted about it to her 16k followers and wrote an opinion piece on Grazia about it. Now, it’s been brought to the attention of the masses and people are not at all happy.

Ocado responded to her concerns by that she could turn the option off in her MyOcado section, but there’s no sign of it saying it will rethink the function or scrap it altogether.

Written by Shannon Peerless, 10 Yetis @ShazzaYeti on Twitter. Seen any good or bad PR lately? You know what to do @10Yetis on Twitter or andy@10Yetis.co.ukon email