What is it about giving someone the title CEO that immediately leads to foot-in-mouth syndrome? The latest gem comes from St Tropez CEO Michelle Feeney in PR Week (http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/920713/Online-Exclusive-Michelle-Feeney-CEO-St-Tropez/) – apparantly she finds the British press ‘predictable, negative and slightly lazy’. Maybe she’d like to tell that to the scores of writers who literally work every hour god sends thanks to the slew of credit crunch related redundancies that means they are doing the work of two, three or even more people. Ill conceived comments that alienate your brand within the media are only made by the foolhardy and rude. Ms Feeney’s bugbear is all to do with how her brand is perceived by the British media. Oh, so lets get this absolutely straight then; she doesn’t like how we write about St Tropez, and that makes us lazy and predictable? Not even a hint at all of any possible appreciation for how well the brand has been supported in the media over the years? Nope, not a bit. This kind of whiny attitude is why I’ll be fake tanning with something else from now on.
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1 comment
I don’t necessarily want gratitude for supporting a brand – although I find it hugely two-faced that she positively dripped gratitude to a room full of journos at a recent launch, only to come out with something like this soon after.
The thing is, up to a point, I agree with her. The link between ads and editorial in glossies particularly does result in lazy, predictable journalism but the brands that she has worked with in the past have colluded and benefited from that sort of journalism so it seems a bit rich that she’s now calling the press out on it.
Moreover, I totally agree with her argument that beauty is as much about science as hairdressing. But if she feels so strongly about that, then why is she not targeting people like me who write extensively about the science behind beauty?
Instead, it seems that freelance journalists who write for newspapers (that’ll be people like me, then) get ignored by her brand and their agents, because they’re too busy pandering to, and fake tanning, the sub-editor and the editor’s secretary’s second cousin on one of the glossies.