Brand Failures

PR failures 125
environmentalists, anti-capitalists and other activists. One of the most
notorious, and certainly one of the most protracted of these confrontations
was the libel case involving Helen Steel and Dave Morris.
Although the trial didn’t reach court until 1994, the case revolved around
a pamphlet first published in 1986 by London Greenpeace, a splinter group
of Greenpeace International. The pamphlet focused on a variety of social and
environmental issues such as animal cruelty, exploitative marketing (in
McDonald’s advertising campaigns aimed at children), rain forest depletion
and the perceived negative health value of McDonald’s products.
However, very few people would now know about the contents of that
pamphlet if McDonald’s hadn’t taken the matter to court. Even Naomi Klein,
the anti-branding commentator and author of No Logo, claims that the
pamphlet distributed by Helen Steel and Dave Morris lacked ‘hard evidence’
and was ‘dated’ in its concerns:
London Greenpeace’s campaign against the company clearly came from
the standpoint of meat-is-murder vegetarianism: a valid perspective,
but one for which there is a limited political constituency. What made
McLibel take off as a campaign on a par with the ones targeting Nike
and Shell was not what the fast-food chain did to cows, forests or even
its own workers. The McLibel movement took off because of what
McDonald’s did to Helen Steel and David Morris.
McDonald’s first sought action against ‘the McLibel two’ over the leaflet in
1990. In fact, the company initially issued libel writs against five activists but
three backed down and apologized. For Steel and Morris, however, the threat
of legal action also represented an opportunity. The trial could, and indeed
did, provide a much larger platform for their views than they would ever have
been given standing outside McDonald’s restaurants distributing pamphlets.
As it turned out, the trial became the longest in English history, with a
staggering total of 313 days in court. And as the trial developed, so too did
the media interest. Pretty soon, millions of people knew exactly what was
being discussed in that courtroom. Every single statement made in the
original pamphlet was discussed and dissected not only in court, but in news
studios around the world. In No Logo, Naomi Klein highlights the protracted
nature of the case: