Apology from Geeklist

Wow, this scream-sexism-at-everything police is becoming very annoying. I do not believe that the video is offensive at all.

I do think the Geeklist founders came across as petty in their constant back and forth with the lady. But to be clear, that has nothing to do with the video being offensive. It isn't.

Classic non-apology apology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology

The lesson here is that defending a brand does not always mean getting defensive. Brand owners have to look at what is being attacked and decide how close it is to the core of the business. A t-shirt fashion shoot video is not the core of the Geeklist business model, so once it became a brand liability it needed to be cast off.

An example of a brand attack that DID call for a head-on approach was the iPhone 4 antenna issue. Those complaints directly attacked a core feature of one of Apple's core products. Apple needed to go on defense because they could not just cast off the iPhone 4 hardware design without very serious financial damage.

Brand owners also need to keep the personal and professional separate when their brand is under attack. Brands are created by a series of decisions. It is one or more of those decisions that are under attack, not the people who made them. In this case the issue was the decision to associate the Geeklist brand with this type of video. Decide whether or not that decision needs defending--don't mistake it for a personal attack.

Hm, I wonder if this will be deleted as well? The two submissions of the Storify article were:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3740378

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3739913

I'm a little concerned/confused as to why. If the apology is HN-appropriate content then I'm a little surprised that the reason for the apology isn't.