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December 12, 2014

The Price of Brand Humor Via Twitter

 

Just like clockwork, another brand has made a humor faux-pas on Twitter by insensitively weighing in on pop culture.

For those who haven’t bowed to the peer pressure and devoured Serial: The criminal case being examined in this weekly podcast phenomenon repeatedly features a Best Buy location in Maryland, from which the alleged murderer reportedly made a call from a nearby payphone. If you say “the payphone by Best Buy” to any number of Serial addicts, you’ll here a flurry of passionate theories being thrown around.

In an attempt to capitalize on this, Best Buy tweeted the following on Thursday:

12.12 best buy

The internet loves lashing out at brands that get it wrong, and it’s usually warranted. There’s a fine line between entering the conversation and cheapening something that’s inarguably more important that consumerism. Our take on this instance? While insensitive and largely uncalled for, we hardly think Best Buy should be hung out to dry for it. Perhaps its just because we can empathize with the huge responsibility of tweeting on behalf of clients. Like many jokes, sometimes they fail to land. Best Buy fully admitted this shortly after:

12.12 2 final

As far as brand apologies go, this one is pretty successful. We don’t think that Best Buy will suffer any long term brand reputation ramifications. If anything, we’ve just been reminded that we need to go a Best Buy for that one cousin who still asks for Blu-rays for Christmas.