 | Beedie School of Business NewsIn March of 2011, in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, Atlanta-based insurance giant Aflac Inc. was forced to confront a marketing fiasco with global implications. The voice of their famous Aflac duck, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, had used his Twitter account to make tasteless jokes about the natural disaster that wiped out entire cities on Japan’s northeast coast. The online backlash against Gottfried’s social media outburst – and ultimately Aflac […] Read More... |
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 | Beedie School of Business NewsOn the eve of London’s Summer Olympic Games, a business study from Simon Fraser University shows that the persistent effectiveness of ambush marketers leaves Olympic sponsors and those of other major sporting events particularly vulnerable – costing them not only their financial investment, but ultimately their customers. Professors Leyland Pitt and Michael Parent from SFU’s Beedie School of Business examined data from the 2008 “Li Ning affair”, which saw Olympic sponsor Adidas ambushed by lesser-known Chinese sportswear company Li Ning at the Beijing Summer Olympics. Read More... |
 | Beedie School of Business NewsSocial media research wins 2011 Best Article AwardNov 02, 2011The management journal Business Horizons and Elsevier have awarded Beedie School of Business researchers Jan Kietzmann, Kristopher Hermkens, Ian McCarthy, and Bruno Silvestre with the Best Article Award for 2011 for their paper, “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media.” Read More... |