Marketing: T Shirt company cottons on after reputation is shaken

The company recently introduced a range of t-shirts for young children with slogans that some thought tongue-in-cheek, some thought funny in a dark kind of way, some thought funny without any agenda and some thought horrible.

Those that thought them horrible mounted a media and internet campaign against them. In a demonstration of how the outrage industry can create a storm out of anything, the story of Cotton On's t-shirts is fascinating.

Some people took offences to slogans such as "they shake me" and "I'm a tits man" on shirts for babies. Others didn't like "I'm living proof my mum is easy" or "watch out boys."

Apparently, these slogans are "offensive" and are even, by some critics, regarding the children as sex objects.

Cotton On originally responded saying, as one might expect, that if people didn't like them, they didn't have to buy them. But that the slogans are not intended to cause harm, and some are jokes at the expense of the parents, not the children.

Their defence was, some might consider, rather too full of marketing terms: the clothes, they said, were "edgy." Quite what they mean by that is unclear: on the edge, or designed to make people uncomfortable? That's the problem with changing what words mean to sound trendy: enough people still know the original to make the message unclear.

Cotton On has now issued a formal apology: and another buzzword laden message. It will ""review the ongoing slogans range to ensure no reference is made to categories pertaining to sexually explicit behaviour, child abuse, drugs and profanity.''

So now the situation is no clearer than before.

But the harm to Cotton On's brand has been done. And here's where the story starts to be problematic.

Unlike the old days of newspapers where, once they had been read they became cat-litter tray bases or fish and chip wrappers (no connection) and one copy remained in a library somewhere, the internet has given former print media a long-term life it has previously never had. And even worse, it has given that life infinite indexability (that's a buzzword, incidentally, and we've no idea if we made it up or not and don't really care). Still worse: lazy internet researchers will often not follow a story through to its end: they will find a fact that spices up a story and not bother to look if it was updated. And so those who find Cotton On's first response may well not look into the later reporting of their apology and change of policy.

Even worse, US and UK courts have effectively ruled that there is little or no protection for reputation on the 'net. Even if the first publisher can be identified and proved to have been libellous, anyone copying and republishing anything someone else has written has almost total freedom to do so in those jurisdictions.

So that means that, as the world's "citizen journalists" write ever more screaming claptrap about Cotton On's shirts and slogans, they can create long-term and deep damage to a brand, almost with impunity. We call it "Reputation Bombing."

It's like the USA carpet bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam war from a great height with no fear of reprisals: harm far beyond anything that is proportionate to any perceived harm (after all, evidence of harm is not the strong point of The Outrage Industry - just the ability to spit a hostile message in the direction of journalists who are too lazy to look for real news or think that a cause will get their name noticed) and real, long term risk of harm lasting well beyond the original conflict and causing damage to the innocents who come along later.

And as the synthetic rage becomes a shriek, even mainstream media get in on the reporting, giving the story additional credence: for example The Australian, not known for its racy reporting, said "anger spread through the social networking sites."

Cotton On may have made an error of judgement: whether it did or not is not the point of this article. It may well have handled complaints badly: that is part of the point. But what is really disturbing is the use of unaccountable media by a self-selecting group of protesters to a) force the company to change its policies; b) to deny parents who do see the joke the right to enjoy it and c) cause long-term harm to a company which is, albeit belatedly, addressing those concerns.

It's a problem that the synthetic rage of the outrage industry will continue to cause, and many reputations will be bombed.