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Argos all at sea over sofas

Posted in Advertising, Branwell Johnson, Latest reporters' blogs May 28th, 2008 by Branwell Johnson

The words “toxic” and “sofas” are two words you don’t want in conjunction if you are a furniture retailer like Argos or Land of Leather – especially if those words are on the front of The Sun.

Today’s’ (28 May) story about a thousand people being burnt by chemicals in foreign-made furniture is going to present a marketing and PR challenge to the retailers concerned.

The Sun story inside the paper showed a burnt baby and an Argos catalogue or print ad shot nearby – definitely not the kind of conjunction the retailer would want.

Apparently the health risk arose last year and Argos and Land of Leather stopped selling the sofas last October. But while a company may think a story long gone and any crisis over, it can suddenly remerge, zombie-like, from the catacombs. The Sun has been contacted by a “shocked mum” whose local Land of Leather would not exchange the sofa and law firms would have been “flooded with queries about the settees.”

It seems the retailers did not really brief down to shop floor level how to handle this particular issue. Now it has returned to cause a headache and is bound to undo the benefits of the Argos festive advertising campaign devised by Clemmow Hornby Inge that introduced the idea of “Argosing it”

Trust is a hard thing to regain once lost, as other brands are discovering from Bernard Matthews to Mattel and ITV. It may not be the direct fault of the company but they better be on the ball when it comes to customer communications and reassurance. Seems like nil points for Land of Leather.