Issues management: Louis Vuitton and Nadia Plesner

Nadia Plesner, a Danish artist, started a campaign in October last year to “raise awareness of the ongoing genocide in Darfur”. Her now-famous illustration of an impoverished Darfur child holding a chihuahua and a Louis Vuitton (LV) bag lookalike was meant to highlight the disparate treatment by the media towards a certain hotel heiress and the situation in Darfur.

The luxury goods giant asked Plesner to cease sales of her designs immediately. She resisted and LV, obviously none too happy about it, brought a lawsuit against Plesner, claiming an incredulously amount of over $20,000 for each day of her Simple Living campaign.

I thought this was a classic David and Goliath story. And indeed, it is. Google for the story and you are likely to find media and blog articles on the issue. Even Jeremiah Owyang (one of my favourite bloggers on the social media scene) devoted an entry on the ongoing suit.

Without going much into the nitty stuff (you can read that yourself), I am wondering what in the world does LV intend to achieve by suing the socks off of a struggling artist, who in her best of intentions, simply took the monogrammed LV bag as an inspiration. LV would have been better off fighting intellectual piracy of its famous bags from the likes of the notorious Ladies Market in HongKong, choc-a-bloc full of LV imitations.

I have no doubt that Plesner will garner much support (she probably already has an army of supporters). There is even a FaceBook group in support of Plesner and her campaign. If LV treads wrongly and insists on going down the libel road, it may find itself in more of a fix than it bargained for.

Will this fiasco hurt LV in the long run? Maybe not. With annual sales of billions, and growing, LV’s main target audience are the mostly the well-heeled with cash to burn. It’s not a mass-market brand. Still, would this hurt LV’s brand reputation and how it is perceived? We can only wait and see how will LV react to the current situation. Their PR agency has their work cut out for them, and in this age of social media, they better have a good online strategy in their pockets too.