I think it’s mostly Primark’s fault.
I wanted to do an edit but too late…
So, a while back we printed a leaflet and soon after we got some outraged people complaining that it was all fake and that we’d made it falsely efnic and that we’d used models to stage it, it got a little press attention and our PR guys went into full on “sorry for any offence”, what they thought was the appropriate recovery.
Actually, they were all genuine students and the entire selection process was “who’s available in an hour to do a photo shoot, we’ll pay you £10”. No selection, no picking out the pretty ones or colour coordination. It did look a wee bit hollyoaks because mostly teenagers who turn up when you say “photoshoot” are confident in their appearance etc. (though we did have a massive ginger in it)
So as soon as we explained that to the offended people they said, oh, fair enough, sorry to waste your time. And we said no bother. But if we’d carried on apologising and withdrawn the leaflet, it’d have gone totally differently.
This sort of thing happens pretty much all the time now, I think. Maybe it’s all part of the same general malaise… People who haven’t done anything wrong think the right thing to do is to back off, “the customer is always right”. Meanwhile people who have done something wrong, will either double down on that, or they’ll do “We’re sorry that you are offended”. The centre cannot hold…