A comprehensive analysis of an organizational crisis in the fashion industry: the case study “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle”

On 8th January 2018, the international fashion brand H&M faced a backlash all around the world. One day before, the clothing retailer published a new garment on its website. The advert featured a children’s sweatshirt with the slogan “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” in white, capital letters, and was modeled by a black, eight-year boy called Liam Mango. In the next two days, the image was taken up on social media, especially on Twitter, where the ad was criticized by customers, journalists, activists, and celebrities for being racist. The controversy and the criticism coming from social media users were immediately and intensively reported by online newspapers, especially in US and UK, the only geographical areas where the advert was published on H&M’s website. Since the controversy had wide media coverage, H&M was forced to apologize to its stakeholders, remove the photo of Liam, and withdraw the product from sale. Nevertheless, the company appointed a diversity leader to emphasize its ant-racist commitment and to prevent similar, future events. This study is focused on the “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” controversy because it emphasizes what are the consequences of unexpected public complaints for organizations that violate the expectations of their stakeholders. Its contribution to the already existing CMC literature is represented by the integration of a corpus-based investigation of the case study with a new perspective on the collected data. Contrarily to the sender-oriented perspective adopted by previous research, where CL was used as research methodology for the assessment of crisis situations (Lischinsky, 2011; Wong, 2020), the present research adopts a receiver-oriented perspective, i.e., it bases the analysis on the content delivered by the receivers of the crisis communications rather than on the content delivered by the organizations. This perspective emphasizes the public’s perception of the crisis and of the organization in crisis.