Germany: Brewery company print Saudis banner on beer bottles
Anticipating the start of the very lucrative Football World Cup, a German brewery, a little too eager to exploit this prodigious vein, learned the hard way that bad publicity was a thousand times more detrimental to trade than not advertising at all…
Indeed, very bad to take the establishment, Eichbaum want to be on time of the World Cup by printing the Saudi flag on the cap of its bottles of beer! Prepared in the greatest secrecy, this vast marketing campaign that extended to the 31 other countries selected for this prestigious sports event, one of the most publicized in the world, has proved to be extraordinarily counterproductive for the brand or how to mark the seal of the sacrilegious, a communication action placed under the sign of the Profitability…
If the strategy to the work was to speak for themselves at any price, in this case especially in evil, the brewery in the turmoil has certainly succeeded his blow, because it has laid on the back a good number of Internet users of Saudis being offended, in Germany and beyond the Rhine, who have found on social networks the perfect outlet for their resentment.
The wrath of the higher spheres has been all the more unquenchable, in the image of the reaction outraged the Saudi Embassy in Berlin who immediately wrote to the German authorities to demand an official apology, but also that the bottles of beer are more defiling the Saudi banner as they were honouring it be withdrawn from the sale.
While the conjectures were going well on the real motivations that have pushed the Eichbaum brewery to commit such a false step, the most indulgent there revealing a gross ignorance of the Islamic principles applied rigorously in Saudi Arabia, the most reassured publicizing a campaign “knowingly offensive to the Muslims,” the establishment’s officials cut short their wildest rumours on Friday, on their Facebook page. Denying any deliberate provocation against the Muslims, they apologized to the Muslim community in Germany in general, and to the Saudis in particular, while indicating that they had withdrawn the bottles at once.
“We just wanted to feature all the flags of countries participating in the World Cup, without any intention of harming Saudi Arabia,” they assured, while the stars that sprinkled their Facebook page were in the process to fade under the flood of negative comments.