If Ratner had had a good PR representative, he would not have made this mistake.I am pretty sure that most of you remember the famous speech of the founder and ex-chief executive of the major British jewellery company Ratners Group (now Signet Group), Gerald Ratner, in which he qualified some of its products as ‘a total crap’ and compared a pair of gold earrings with a prawn sandwich from M&S; saying that the earrings were cheaper than the sandwich and the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings.After eighteen years, many people still remember him, some as a joke and others as an example to never do what he did.He basically ruined his entire professional life with only two phrases and just because he wanted to make a joke in front of 5,000 members of the Institute of Directors at The Royal Albert Hall. The problem was that no one advice him that those kind of jokes are not appropriate for any speech and they were not good publicity at all, as he thought.
Although he regretted having said what he said, and that he admitted that he lost everything because of that, the truth is that he is never going to get rid of such a bad reputation and the proof of this is that even nowadays people quote the term “Doing a Ratner” for dull doing.
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