A Swedish underwear company, Björn Borg, held a poll for what country was "in most need of love and seduction." North Korea won. The problems here should be apparent already, but it only gets worse. Apparently, the company thought it was a good idea to have a journalist drop the underwear from her balcony, calling them "weapons of mass seduction." The fact that few people would actually find this joke funny in a highly repressive dictatorship that is actually devoted to developing nuclear weapons apparently escaped the people making this decision.
This was a pretty serious PR mistake to begin with, but the company has done absolutely nothing to rectify it. Instead, their marketing director released a statement in which she said she was "proud" of the effort. Unsurprisingly, the move has garnered criticism from human rights groups, in light of both its insensitivity and the fact that it mostly just created an embarrassing situation.
If the company thought this would be a good way to promote their brand, their judgment is stunningly poor. They also seem to have yet to realize that they now have a PR crisis on their hands that should probably be dealt with by issuing an apology rather than doubling down on what was an imprudent idea to begin with. Whether they will actually realize their mistake has yet to be seen.
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