Tim Hortons officials sorry for ad blunder

PRESQUE ISLE – Tim Hortons officials publicly apologized Thursday for a recent marketing promotion that appalled the local family of a woman who was murdered last winter in a Tim Hortons coffee shop.

The “Get Mugged with Tim Hortons” contest, which aired this week on a northern Maine radio station, offered call-in participants the chance to “get mugged” by winning a coffee mug and a dozen doughnuts.

The play on words did not amuse the family of Erin Sperrey, who was beaten to death in January while working the night shift at a Tim Hortons restaurant in Caribou.

“I am appalled that you would dare use a reference to violence in your advertising campaigns,” Johna Lovely, Sperrey’s mother, wrote in an e-mail Wednesday to Tim Hortons officials. “If you are going to do that, why don’t you go all the way and make it ‘Get Mugged and Murdered with Tim Hortons’?”

Lovely was on her way to the cemetery to visit her daughter’s grave when she heard the promotion on the radio.

“I thought, ‘Who in their right mind would put something like this on the radio?'” she said Thursday.

Nick Javor, Tim Hortons vice president of corporate affairs, apologized to Lovely and her family by e-mail Wednesday and on Thursday publicly apologized for the marketing campaign.

“The minute it was brought to my attention, I called and expressed my incredible disappointment,” Javor said Thursday. “From this perspective, it’s a classic case of one department of a company not appreciating the sensitivity of what happened to the Sperrey family and the community. It was a poor choice of words for a promotion anywhere. We feel awful.”

Company officials removed the “Get Mugged” promotion from the northern Maine markets and from all other markets where it was running. They also set forth a directive that the tag line not be used again for any type of promotion.

Sperrey’s family, though, is still in shock.

“We’ve been through hell in the last eight months,” Lovely said. “To me, it’s like they forgot what happened to my child at their business.”