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Groupon Fails To Curry Favor With Americans, Tibetans or Chinese

Washington Post ON FAITH
Groupon Fails To Curry Favor With Americans, Tibetans or Chinese
By Matteo Pistono Monday, February 8, 2011

Americans know the Chinese government is destroying Tibet’s Buddhist culture. And the American public likes a good deal when it comes to dining out.

Yesterday, during the Super Bowl, the online coupon dealer Groupon ran an advertisement stating exactly that.

Why did Groupon pay 3 million dollars to run a thirty second ad that combines the suffering of Tibetan Buddhists with a cheap meal?

First, if you were not one of the 112 million folks who were watching the Super Bowl and the ad, check it out on youtube.



The cultural misrepresentations are obvious—Tibetans traditionally do not eat fish; curry is a dish from the Indian subcontinent; and Nepalese and Indians, not Tibetans, run the Himalayan Restaurant in Chicago. But this is a diversion.

The answer to why Groupon would run the ad is obvious. Tibet, even the repression of its population of 6 million, has cache so why not make a buck off of it?

The reaction online in the last 24 hours to Groupon’s ad has been overwhelmingly negative. A wide spectrum of news wires, blogs and commentators have reported how the viewing public thought the ad was ill advised at best. “Offensive” is one of the most commonly used descriptions on Twitter and blogs, and rightly so. This is not to say that some did not see the ad as satire. And, undoubtedly the ad and cyber-uproar since has generated traffic to Groupon’s website, as evidenced by one HuffPost commentator who noted, “the controversy made me go to their website and sign up for some sweet deals.”

Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason felt a need to respond today to the criticism but not to apologize. Quite the contrary. He blogged in his company’s defense that they “would never have run these ads if we thought they trivialized the cause…” concluding, “We took this approach knowing that, if anything, they would bring more funding and support to the highlighted causes.”

It is intriguing to note that Chinese nationalists in Beijing took offense to the ad as well because they perceived it as supporting the Tibetan cause. The Chinese government’s discomfort with the Groupon ad demonstrates once again the lack of legitimacy they have with the occupation of Tibet.

Groupon does engage in corporate philanthropy by supporting the Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace, and the New York based Tibet Fund, which the fish curry ad was intended to benefit. One of the errors in Groupon’s ad, apart from the basic moral miscalculation of using the Tibetan people’s suffering to sell meal coupons, was how they did not include in the ad their philanthropic website, savethemoney.org. Yet, even if they had stated some of their profits benefit Tibetan organizations, there is little doubt the ad would not have tarnished Groupon’s image.

Groupon’s attempt to broadcast their commitment to corporate social responsibility was indeed a bad curry of messages that was not to anyone’s taste.

www.matteopistono.com
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