all publicity etc etc

I've just had my first (I say first, that may be a bit of an assumption) customer in who has sworn never to enter Waterstone's again, she feels completely betrayed by the whole windowgate / christmas catalogue expose. It wasn't so much the fact that positioning was being paid for- she understands that retailers are here to make money but really that so much effort was put into it to make these look like genuine choices.
While it is, obviously, not true that there is no such thing as bad publicity it is a pretty safe bet that media exposure will generally do you nothing but good but some real damage seems to have been done here. Mind you, we don't know how many people woke up, heard the news, realised that what they had been missing these past few days was a good book and found themselves in the chain whose name had been planted into their heads that morning