Dealing with product controversies after Asda and Tesco mental health row: What do retailers need to know?

Why are we talking about this now?

Asda has withdrawn a ‘mental patient’ fancy dress costume from sale after the product was deemed distasteful by the public and celebrities including former footballer Stan Collymore and Labour spindoctor Alistair Campbell on Twitter. The costume is designed to look like a straitjacket covered in blood and went on sale through clothing arm George at Asda for £20. Tesco followed suit after complaints were made over a costume called ‘Psycho Ward’ which featured a model in an orange jumpsuit with the word ‘committed’ on it. Tesco has also apologised after a blow up doll labelled “gay best friend” was uploaded by a third party on to its marketplace site before Tesco immediately removed the “offensive” item.

Have there been any similar incidents in the past?

It is not the first time a Tesco product has caused public outrage. In 2008, the retailer sold a padded bra marketed at girls as young as seven which was condemned for sexualising children by parents and the National Union of Teachers. Tesco said it was designed to help girls at a “self-conscious age when they are just developing”.

In the same year, collapsed general merchandise retailer Woolworths withdrew a line of furniture which included the ‘Lolita bed’. Woolworths said its staff had not understood the sexual connotations of the name – the underage protagonist in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel – and refused to withdraw the product until they looked it up on Wikipedia and promptly withdrew it from sale.

How do you make a judgment on what is acceptable?

Hamish Thompson, managing director of PR firm Twelve Thirty Eight, said retailers simply need to employ common sense. “There is the Daily Mail test – if it may prove controversial,how would it react? But common sense needs to be employed about whether a product is age appropriate or you are trading off others’ misfortunes, such as the mentally ill,” he says.

“Retailers also need to be aware that what may have been borderline acceptable four or five years ago will not be now. Twitter is forensic and when you have thousands of products on sale you are always under the microscope.”

How should retailers react?

Both Asda and Tesco quickly apologised for the sale of the items and Asda said it will make a “sizeable” donation to the Mind charity for mental illness. Thompson believes their approach was the right one. “You have to assess it quickly, apologise and stand back.

Twitter is a cathartic medium and to some extent you need to allow people to vent without answering back, unless people have the wrong end of the stick,” says Thompson. “Also there’s nuance in language, to sound sincere you need to say ‘sorry that’ rather than ‘sorry if’ [people were offended].”