THE BASSIE BRAND, THE BUST-UP AND THE BIKE

While the world turns, one SA’s finest “ladies” (and I mean that in the old-fashioned sense, ie: a babe with extremely good manners plus grace and charm in bucketloads etc) has landed up in court, to contest the unapproved use of her image in an ad for a bike company.

Basetsana Kumalo, is “locked in a court battle” with a company that she claims exploited her image by publishing a commercially unflattering picture of her, in an ad, without her permission.

The Times Live report that the MD of the company, Andrew McClean, testified that they had snapped a picture while Kumalo visited the shop in her leisure time and then used it because it “needed a black woman in it’s advertising.”

“We were going to use a picture of my wife, but when Mrs Kumalo walked in we said “this is nice.”

Kumalo is upset because the picture was a casual one and one she deemed unflattering.

With regard to her outrage at the use of her image, I’m with her all the way.

As a major SA celeb, she must be inundated with fans asking for her picture, and I would imagine she is totally within her rights to expect those pictures to be used for nerdy bragging and nothing else.

But as to whether the use of the image has “damaged” her to the tune of a high-profile court case and R500 000 damages … I’m not so sure.

Bassie is a woman who both knows that power of her own brand and works incredibly hard to build and maintain it.

But “Brand Bassie” is a gleaming, polished one. She is admired and held in great affection, by her fans and the South African public in general…is the use of an unflattering picture really such a blow? A blow to the tune of R500 000?

I can see how she could be spitting mad:

An bad image can be just a little damaging to all of us.

Not least to our egos.

(I would, if I could, edit every single image that ever saw the light of day, of me – not much of a brand at all – so feel sympathy for her, there.)

Also, the notion that the MD of the company, it appears, didn’t understand that who she was, and claimed to want to use her image “because we needed a black woman for our advertising” must be infuriating, to a celebrity,  too.

But I’m puzzled.

Isn’t the point that that the bike company published the image without her permission?

Not that it was unflattering to her?

Even though Borat cycling clothes are of course, the most unflattering on earth, and actually mounting a bike is fraught with danger and sure to result in terrible pictures if caught on camera.

No-one should ever be photographed in cycling clothes, on a bike or anywhere near anything bike-related if they need to keep their dignity in tact.

Maybe she was advised by her legal team, that she was more likely to inflict a major and painful blow on Cycle Lab through claiming damages to her right to maintain her polished and beautifully-groomed image, than by going through some complicated case hanging on the rights to a picture.

Surely the graceful course of action for both parties, was for Cycle Lab to have apologised abjectly, removed the image as fast as was possible and made the biggest donation they could possibly afford to Bassie’s favourite charity, grovelling and begging and scraping at her feet all the time.

And Bassie, could perhaps, have accepted all the grovelling and scraping, and moved on.

Perhaps they offered something like that, and she wouldn’t accept. Maybe they didn’t offer, were unrepentant and stubborn and left her thwarted, fuming and frustrated.

Either way, it’s a shame that it should land up like this.

It seems to me that the worst damage to anyone’s reputation and image happens as soon as you land up in court.

Mud sticks… and it’s very hard to come out of any of these messy, public cases, gleaming, polished and immaculate.