When your company takes a strong public stance on an issue, displaying any behavior that contradicts that position is very dangerous. If you need proof, look no further than the crisis management French anti-piracy group Hadopi, who was caught red-handed last week using a font which was created exclusively for another business, is being forced to do. This quote from a FontFeed.com article describes what happened after a few type-savvy Web users spotted the similarities:
By the end of the weekend the story was raging like a wildfire, and on Monday it even was a news item on LCI, the news channel of French commercial broadcaster TF1. Of course you have to appreciate the irony – the agency in charge of enforcing France’s new anti-piracy legislation using a pirated proprietary font in its very own logo. Bienvenue isn’t available for licensing, and neither France Télécom nor Jean François Porchez were contacted to request an exceptional permission to use it. It painfully demonstrates the amateurism and general cluelessness of the agency’s communication consultants, and puts Plan Créatif in a very bad spotlight.
Hadopi’s crisis response created even more of a backlash when their claim that the presented logo was in fact a “sketch,” and not the intended final release, was blown out of the water by bloggers who revealed that the “intended” logo had been created and purchased the very morning it was released.
The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/