Why Kenneth Cole's Syria Tweet Was Smart Marketing

You've heard the old adage "any publicity is good publicity," right? When marketers are on the receiving end of "any publicity," that usually means bad publicity. And it's usually not intentional. Oh, sure, there are marketers like GoDaddy and others who play the "banned ad" PR card by claiming a network banned their commercial from the Super Bowl when, in fact, the brand never had any intentions of running the submitted version. But for the most part, marketers avoid bad publicity like the plague.

Unless that marketer is Kenneth Cole. You've probably read some of Kenneth Cole's tweets. Most famously, he weighed in on the Egypt uprising in 2011 when he tweeted, "Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC"

More recently, Cole, who runs his own Twitter account separate from that of the Kenneth Cole brand, weighed in on the Syrian crisis.

While many have chastised Cole for his tweets, this is why we think his controversial tweets are smart marketing (this article continues on the Central Desktop blog where it was originally published).