There was a cheeky attempt by the German airline Lufthansa recently to exploit Apple’s misfortune and work it to their own PR advantage.
After an Apple engineer left his prototype of a new iPhone 4G in a German beer garden (and it subsequently ended up on blog Gizmodo) the airline’s PR had a good stab at capitalising on the story by publicly offering him free business class flights to Germany to sample its Bavarian Beer Garden Business Lounge.
Lufthansa wrote him a letter pointing out that his passion for German beer and culture was appreciated, and offered the trip as a way of ‘experiencing the best Germany has to offer’, while escaping from the heat of the world’s press. Nice.
The communications team denied the story was a PR stunt but ‘genuine altruism’. Not that we’ve ever tried to do anything like this before either oh no… *hut hem*.
Anyway, what do you think – good siezure of a press opportunity or a shameless piggyback of the Apple story?