Good and Bad PR: The good guys are Cadbury and Aldi

Happy Friday guys! Here’s your round up of good and bad PR for this week, so whether you’re sat in the sun or at your desk, have a little mooch of what is going off in the world of PR.

Good PR  

Aldi  
Another good one from Aldi to add the long list recently; the supermarket chain has announced that it’s going to scrap traditional plastic bags from all of its stores and are replacing them with paper and biodegradable versions. One half of the stores will be offering paper bags and the other half of stores will be offered compostable bags as a trial in a bid to see which does best and which will be rolled out permanently later down the line. Well done Aldi, you go lead that pack!

Cadbury

Last year Cadbury launched the ‘Cadbury Inventor Competition’ to find the latest chocolate bars, allowing Britons to enter three ingredients and name their creations. It has now announced the three finalists; The Raspberry Shortcake, Simply The Zest and Choca-Latte. While all three chocolate bars are now on sale, there can still only be one winner and you still need to go online and vote for your favourite. What a great way to get people buying its product and talking about the brand!

Bad PR

EasyJet and KLM

It’s annoying when your flight is delayed, but it’s even worse when you’re on an EasyJet flight that somehow bumps wings with a KLM flight at Schiphol Airport, rendering both planes useless for a few hours. Thankfully I can report that all passengers were unharmed, but come on Mr or Ms EasyJet pilot – do you not have eyes?! It’s not like aeroplanes are small and easy to miss.

British Airways

This isn’t a reoccurring theme where all I do today is give bad PR to airlines and aeroplanes, I promise.

British Airways has come under fire this week as the company has been fined £183 million (eek!) for a passenger data breach. BA said that it was ‘disappointed and surprised’ at the size of the fine that comes following its website linking through to a fraudulent site that took the details of as many as 500,000 customers. It obviously was the result of a hacker, but this happened post-GDPR and BA is quite clearly being made an example of – there should have been processes in place to prevent this from happening in the first place. Although don’t feel too bad for BA; whilst the fine sounds big, that’s only 1.5% of its global turnover.

PrettyLittleThing

This week PrettyLittleThing has come under fire for sending out a red bikini that was found to have stains on the crotch, outside of the hygienic protection label – and what makes this story even worse is that it’s not the first time it’s happened; just a few months ago a bikini was delivered with what looked like period stains inside. We’ve all ordered and sent items back before, but clearly there needs to be a more stringent process in place to ensure only the highest quality items are being sent out to the next shopper – because let’s be honest, this is disgusting!!

Note to self: check, double check and triple check all clothing that I order online from now on.

Written by Samantha Summers, 10 Yetis. Seen any good or bad PR lately? You know what to do @10Yetis on Twitter or andy@10Yetis.co.uk on email