Guerrilla Counterfeit campaign by IACC creates controversy
A campaign by the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition (IACC) to bring awareness to students has stirred controversy in recent days.
According to reports, the IACC sponsored a course at Hunter College where students created a type of “guerrilla marketing” campaign to raise awareness on the dangers of counterfeiting. In the class, students created a fictional person named Heidi Cee who wrote a blog and had a MySpace page.
Based on the blog posts, the story created by the class is as follows:
One day, Heidi forgets her Coach bag in the cafeteria. As it was a 2-year anniversary gift from her ex-boyfriend Adam (who is currently serving in Iraq), Heidi desperately seeks the return of the bag. She advertises a reward of $500, and “Melanie” returns the bag. The next day, Heidi realizes that the bag returned is nothing more than a counterfeit Coach bag.
“Heidi’s Poster”
Based on this experience, Heidi decides to do some research and get involved. She contacts the IACC and gets them to sponsor an event on campus. They even say that they’ll contact Coach to help out as well.
The students of the class, along with the IACC, actually do put on an event on campus on May 10, 2007. The character Heidi however, is unable to attend due to the following reason posted on her blog:
first off, let me start by apologizing for not being there today! my uncle had a stroke Wednesday night and we all had to drive out to jersey to be with him. Crappy timing right? Everything is ok now, hes fine… his lip was paralyzed but hes slowly regaining feeling and movement now =D
Break the Chain: Hunter College.
On the final post, Heidi lets the readers into the secret in a post titled “Here is the catch - I am totally not real!”. The post is a news released from the IACC.
Faculty at Hunter College are raising concerns in the matter in which the class was developed.
According to the complaints filed with the Faculty Senate, Hunter agreed to let the IACC sponsor a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods. One goal of the effort was to mislead students not in the course into thinking that they were reading about someone real. So-called “guerrilla marketing” — in which consumers are unaware that they are being marketed — is the subject of some controversy in the marketing and public relations world. But even among advocates for the tactic, there are some who are disturbed about what happened at Hunter.
Some question why a for-credit college class at a public university should be doing, in effect, discount marketing work for an industry group. Some wonder about a college using some students to fool other students. Others are concerned about the circumstances of the course itself. It was created without any curricular review. The professor who taught it says that he was pressured to do so even though he has no expertise in advertising or public relations (he teaches computer graphics) and had ethical qualms about the course.
Further, the professor — and other professors who have investigated the circumstances of the course — maintain that the professor was required to teach only one side of the issue, had to accept industry officials watching him teach, and had little clout to fight back since he didn’t (and still doesn’t) have tenure.
The department chair — designated by Hunter as the only person to speak officially about the course — at first said that this was “a Hunter matter” and didn’t warrant outside attention. But he then said that everyone involved had free choice to participate or not, and that there were no academic freedom issues raised by the arrangement. He did acknowledge, however, that the department had already adopted at least one reform in the wake of the experience: Any other new “sponsored” courses will have to be reviewed by a curriculum committee before they can be taught.
See the campaign summary from the IACC (PDF)
