By pulling its campaign with the Daily Mail, Paperchase has ended up looking like it has no principles at all

Poor old Paperchase. The stationery company wrapped itself in knots this weekend, having run a reader offer with the Daily Mail on Saturday only to then say sorry for doing so after being criticised on social media. The resulting publicity presumably isn’t what Paperchase had in mind just before Christmas.

Some people tend to live by the motto “never explain, never apologise”: indeed, that was the attitude of a few newspaper editors once upon a time. As any PR professional will tell you, it doesn’t really wash any more – the trick is to know when an apology is appropriate and what explanation will ring true.

For Paperchase, the whole episode smacks of indecision and panic, rowing back on a commercial deal at the behest of a social media mob. No wonder that the company has come in for further criticism following its apology.

The U-turn was certainly confusing. After all, running a reader promotion in a national newspaper is not something a company would do lightly, not least because of the money involved. Unless there was the mother of all communication breakdowns at Paperchase, somebody senior must have taken the decision that a promotion in the Mail would attract custom.

Yet the sudden apology, made after Paperchase had “listened to you”, gave the impression that it was acting in response to concerns expressed by its customer base – who were presumably not Daily Mail readers. Is Paperchase really so confident that there is no crossover between a Mail audience and buyers of mid-priced stationery that it was effectively willing to disown the former?

Alternatively, Paperchase were caught in the swirling current of a Twitter storm and decided the best response was to row back to calmer seas as quickly as possible. Yet by apologising so swiftly and with an ‘umbleness worthy of Uriah Heep (“We now know we were wrong to do this – we’re truly sorry and we won’t ever do it again.”), the move looked like a cynical attempt to get on the side of the “good guys”.

It also gave the ludicrous impression that Paperchase was previously unaware of the Daily Mail’s reputation for dividing opinion. Love it or loath it, the Daily Mail makes no bones about what it stands for and what its editorial views are. Moreover, the lobbying campaign which seeks to persuade companies not to take ad space in the Mail has itself gained a high profile – if Paperchase was not aware of that either, then someone, somewhere must have been in for an almighty telling off on Monday morning.

Of course, the broader question in all this is whether companies who want to sell a product should avoid advertising with media outlets that some people dislike. Certainly the Stop Funding Hate campaign group have been vocal in suggesting they should. Yet intrinsic in that argument is a peculiar disregard for the commercial freedom of a business to advertise its wares wherever it believes potential customers will see them; it also displays a remarkable degree of antipathy towards readers of those newspapers being targeted.

Yet commercial freedom cuts both ways. While Paperchase’s vacillation has exposed a lack of clear strategic thinking, the criticism directed at other firms who have stopped advertising in particular newspapers seems as wide of the mark as the aggression directed at those who have carried on.

Ultimately, just as individuals should be free to consume whatever news media they wish, so advertisers should be at liberty to direct their ad spend wherever they wish. To conclude that by advertising with a given newspaper the advertiser automatically endorses its editorial line is nonsensical. Indeed, it deliberately blurs the editorial and commercial boundaries in a way that the media itself seeks not to do – not least, ironically, for fear of being slated by the very critics who want to doom the conservative media by going after its advertisers.

For Paperchase, the problem is not that it ran a promotion with the Mail; nor that it has decided no longer to do so. The problem is that by changing tack so suddenly and so completely, it has ended up looking as if it has no principles at all. That’s why we all should be wary of reacting to social media – much better to write an old-fashioned letter.