The Komen Foundation’s Even Bigger PR Problem

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Clara Jeffery has a piece today about the Komen Foundation and what they can do to recover from their Planned Parenthood fiasco, and it’s worth a read. But it reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to point out: one of the remarkable things about this controversy is that a lot of it hasn’t really been about the controversy itself. Rather, for a lot of people it seems like it was just a long-awaited excuse to finally blow up over their long-simmering dislike of the Komen Foundation and its seemingly endless commercialization of all things breast cancer related. I don’t really have much to say about this since I’m pretty removed from the whole thing, but one PR lesson Komen should learn is that apparently there’s long been a helluva lot of unvoiced annoyance/discontent/exasperation/anger/etc. toward the Komen Foundation among a lot of women. And now that it’s finally out, it’s going to be hard to stuff it back into its bottle. I wonder if they had any idea before this that they were so heartily disliked by so many people who — until now — just didn’t feel like it was OK to say so out loud?

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