BARILLA, a classic Italian pasta making company just lost a huge segment of their customer base. Why? Because it’s chairman publicly announced that he “would not (feature gay families in advertisements)” as he does not “see things like they do and (thinks) the family (they) speak to is a classic family.” And if you thought that was astonishing, when he was asked on a radio interview what he would do if his gay customer segment doesn’t like it, he responded blatantly by saying “eat another brand of pasta”. This chairman clearly does not have a clear understanding of ethics and/or social etiquette.
This obviously outraged a vast amount of people and cultivated a mass amount of negative publicity for the company. It even encouraged people to create pressure groups (boycotting) and caused many customers to switch over to competitor brands such as Ragu.
Customers angrily began to tweet:
This hard-hitting negativity probably put the chairman back into his senses, as it lead to him apologizing on Facebook and Twitter pages. But how sincere was his apology and did it fix the damage that was already done? In my opinion after he made such blatant and controversial statements, it would be hard to gain back the loyalty of his homosexual customers, as well as those who strongly support gay rights. As the apology directly followed the continuous flow of online-hate, you can only assume that it was superficial and done only to gain back whatever his company had lost.