Mark Andrews: Public relations? You're taking the pee

Imagine you work for a giant lager brewer in China, and you are summoned to a crisis meeting to explain how you will handle a video that is about to spread all around the world, and that might be a little bit difficult to explain to your customers.

"OK, hit me – what is the content of this video which is going to cause so many problems?"

"Er, well, it shows footage of a man dressed in a hard hat and blue overalls, climbing inside a malt container at our Pingdu works, unzipping his trousers and, ahem, taking a leak."

"Er, I see..."

So far, Tsingtao, the lager brand affected by the incident, has assured customers that none of the ahem, sweet and sour seasoning, has made its way into the beer supply. The matter was reported to police at the earliest available opportunity, and an investigation was being carried out.

"The company continues to strengthen its management procedures and ensure product quality."

Something tells me this is not going to blow over that easily. Maybe it's slightly different in heavily regulated China, but once something like this gets out, the momentum becomes unstoppable. Suddenly the focus of the world's media attention, every disgruntled former employee will be crawling out the woodwork with a tale to tell. On Thursday this week, shares in the brewer fell to a 52 per cent low.

So speaking as someone with precisely zero experience of the PR game, I would suggest that the company will need to go on the offensive, and try spinning the incident as a positive.

Now don't ever recall trying Tsingtao, but I'm fairly sure what it will taste like – nothing. It's a lager, after all, and every lager in the world tastes exactly the same – cold, gassy, and with no flavour whatsoever. So the answer must be to spin the incident as a positive, something that will make Tsingtao stand out from the crowd. Something different, something modern, something refreshing. The only beer that contains... I can see the ad campaign now.

It's not as if this kind of thing is without precedent. Chances are you know that many bottled beers already use finings, which a euphemism for fish bladders, as preservatives. And coffee connoisseurs think nothing of paying £100 a lb for a bit of Kopi Luwak, considered to be the finest caffeine-based beverage money can buy. What you don't see on any of the marketing material, though, is how this rather distinctive coffee is made. Coffee beans are fed to civets, small cat-like creatures found in Asia and Africa, and once they have been partially digested, their droppings are collected to make the coffee. Personally, I think I'll stick with Nescafe.

Then there's vanilla ice cream. Everyone knows were vanilla comes from, right? The pods of evergreen vines that majestically grow in Madagascar? Well not always. Because in about six per cent of ice creams, particularly in the luxury brands, the flavouring is actually sourced from castoreum, a brown slimy liquid that beavers use to mark their territory. And how do the ice-cream purveyors obtain it? By 'milking' a beaver's bum, of course.

And if you think that's strange, wait until you hear about ambergris, or whale poo as the rest of us would call it. Said to have a 'marine, fecal odor' and a greasy texture when freshly delivered, it acquires a sweet, earthy scent as it ages. It commands huge prices, and is highly prized by perfume makers as it provides a 'fixative' that allows the scent to last much longer. But aside from its use as a perfume, it is increasingly being used in the US to make trendy drinking chocolates.

So, if ice-cream gourmets will pay through the nose for the taste of beavers' anal glands, coffee connoisseurs will pay through the nose for animal droppings, and people with more money than sense will lap up a mug of whale slime before they go to bed, it can't be beyond the wit of the marketing industry to turn pee-flavoured lager into the hipsters' choice.