When is a billboard more than a billboard? When it’s a PR disaster
After associating itself with a mass-suicide cult, a Mexican restaurant apologized and removed the offending ad. (Image via South Bend Tribune.)
Associating your brand with a mass-suicide cult? Hmmm …
It seems like common sense not to link your brand to the Jonestown massacre, in which 900 members of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple drank cyanide-laced punch in Guyana. That didn’t stop northern Indiana’s Hacienda Restaurants from doing exactly that with some billboards that advertise, “We’re like a cult with better Kool-Aid.”
USA Today took notice, and now the restaurant group is doing damage control.
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