Nestle's Pedobear Marketing Fail

Aug. 13, 2012 - PRLog -- People who spend time on the popular, and sometimes maligned, sites 4Chan or Reddit are quite familiar with the images of Pedobear. It seems that Nestle's marketing department does no such thing since they unknowingly thought to use a costumed image of a bear, quite similar to Pedobear, to launch their Instagram account.

http://blog.friendseat.com/nestle-mistakenly-uses-pedobear-in-ad-campaign

There is some confusion as to what Pedobear is. Spence Cooper of FriendsEAT explains that "Pedobear is a cartoon bear who appears when people are writing questionable material about kids on the Internet. Pedobear originated on a site called 4chan, an image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images."

When the coincidence was brought up to Nestle in Australia and New Zealand, both arms of the company denied knowing anything about the link to the above symbolism.
Thanks to social media, Nestle was quickly informed about the matter and was able to react with significant speed.

Nestle is not the only company to fall under Pedobear's spell. Other companies have unknowingly utilized this image for marketing purposes. Pedobear has even made it onto iPhone apps, to be promptly removed from the app store.

It goes to show that marketing departments need to be more savvy and vigilant over their campaigns.