Burton’s Playboy Themed Snowboards: The Business of Controversy

Burton Snowboards have come under some heat for the recent launching of it’s ‘Coalition Love Playboy Models’ series of snowboards.  These boards, while highly engineered to Burton standards, offer a graphical side to what is acceptable in the mainstream and in what consumers are willing to buy.

These snowboards offer graphics of a ‘playboy sexual’ nature with barely clad (do socks count?) female graphics and a litle eye teaser on the backside.

These snowboards, which I do refuse to show here, offer up a highly argumentative conversation on what the ‘decency’ standard for such equipment should be.  Should we accept these boards as a person’s ‘freedom of self-expression’, or should they be disallowed (dare I say banned) due to their graphic nature and the possibility that children will see them?  Some would argue that the younger crowd is the exact aim of the highly graphical snowboards.

The corporate headquarters of Burton has been inundated with more than 100 protesters arguing their case against the latest Burton line.  The protesters included women’s groups and a group of men who fight against domestic violence.  The Burlington, Vermont company says that it’s latest two lines (another snowboard line being protested includes graphics of self mutilation) is a freedom of expression for the company. They have refused to pull the two lines of snowboards.

Since these two lines of snowboards have been released to the consumer market, Burton has found itself losing some public prominence and influence with some of the better things it is involved with.  Burton sponsors a program to help disadvantaged kids to get outside and learn about the sport of snowboarding.  Some of the fellow sponsors of Burton’s program have now backed out of the deal and refuse to support a company that does not have their consumers best interest at heart.

On the downside of this debate, and one of the reasons that Burton is probably refusing to pull these lines of boards, is that any controversy, especially a freedom of expression (or freedom of speech) issue, is that these controversies draw attention and sales from the consumers to the company.  Sometimes the marketing of such items are used specifically to draw an interest in the product.  As they say, bad publicity is still publicity and ANY publicity usually garners a few more sales than none at all.