If it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it, as that old business adage has it, then in this digital age that can be processed into seconds and a just a few blunt keystrokes.

The Coylumbridge Aviemore Hotel brilliantly demonstrated how it can be achieved when it handed out impersonal notes to its workers during the week, not just sacking them on the spot without compensation but demanding they immediately leave their tied accommodation. That they all appeared to be Eastern European, with nowhere else to go, as well as underlining the heartless brutality of it, proved the truth of the billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s original observation, without the grace he expressed.

It wasn’t so much a public relations disaster as a megaton explosion, a disastrous, atomising own goal

which had celebrities and politicians queuing up to vow they’d never grace the sheets again and media throughout the world highlighting it, with the sacked workers shown dragging their suitcases away or, in one case, photogenically posing in the tent he’s been forced into for shelter.

Britannia Hotels, which has 60 other billets along with Coylumbridge, didn’t have a wholesome reputation before this. Which? magazine has rated the chain the worst in the country for seven years in a row. At least it doesn’t have to fear any competition this year.

Very belatedly Britannia, which originally blamed the coronavirus for the purging, got round to reacting, blaming an administrative error on the sackings although, at the time of writing, it hasn’t said if the workers will get their jobs and beds back.

This all took place just as the Scottish Government was announcing financial measures to aid businesses throughout the country, and leisure and tourism ones in particular. The Coylumbridge hotel is in Finance Secretary Kate Forbes’s constituency. She’s already tweeted strongly against the company, so there’s unlikely to be any alms heading to Aviemore from her.

The peer in the PR disaster business has to be Gerald Ratner who, in a few flippant comments about his company’s “crap” jewellery products in 1991, wiped more than £500 million off the company’s share price. He said his stores sold a pair of earrings for under a pound, cheaper than a shrimp sandwich from Marks & Spencer, but they probably wouldn’t last as long. He was eventually forced to stand down.

If the Ratner Effect is the gold standard of boo-boos, there have been a host of worthy contenders. In 2018, the Swedish-owned budget high street chain H&M advertised a hoodie, worn by a black kid, with the slogan “Coolest monkey in the jungle” across it. I mean, even if English was your fifth language and you’d been locked up in a non-speaking seminary for decades, how could you put that out? Dozens, nay hundreds, of people must have been involved, from the person who first drew it on paper, through the buyers and marketers and PRs who approved it. Did no-one even say “Oops!”?

If wasn’t H&M’s first gaffe either. A year before it was selling a T-shirt with “Unemployed” on the front.

Fashion brands have a history of crass insensitivity, or casual racism. Gucci had to apologise for its £700 black polo neck and balaclava combination, featuring a cut-out around the mouth, outlined in red lips and labelled “Blackface”. Prada had to withdraw a series of monkey-like figurines, priced around £475, and was forced to apologise.

Arrant stupidity wasn’t confined to top designer brands. A director of Topman, unveiling a new range of suits, said its customers were “football hooligans” and they were targeting beer-swilling lads who wore a suit only when appearing in court.

PR disasters know no bounds. Last November, the US car manufacturer Tesla unveiled its Blade Runner-like pickup truck made in “ultra-hard 30x cold-rolled stainless steel” which chairman Elon Musk claimed was “bulletproof” and impervious to a 9mm handgun. His colleague, Tesla’s chief designer, lobbed a hefty metal ball at the windscreen to demonstrate its strength. The screen unobligingly broke.

“At least it didn’t go through,” Musk said queasily, “room for improvement.”

In 2016, Samsung stopped selling its Galaxy Note 7 mobile phones after they kept going on fire. The company’s profits went down by one-third and Samsung lost more than £10 billion in sales revenue.

Ten years ago the chief executive of BP, Tony Hayward, was forced to resign after the the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11 workers and creating the worst oil spill in US history. Not for the disaster but his comment, after the deaths, that he “wanted his life back”. Earlier he had said: “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.”

Politicians and pop stars have also had their major faux pas. Labour leader Neil Kinnock, on Brighton beach in 1983, was striding to victory in the forthcoming General Election.

“If you want a real scoop,” he said to the press pack following him, pointing at the sea, “I’ll walk out there, on the water.” Moments later he stumbled avoiding a wave and ended up buttock-deep in the sea. The election was lost too.

In 2014, another Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was mocked for failing to deal with a bacon sandwich. His brother David, whom he had beaten for the top job, had, years before, been photographed gurning embarrassedly with a banana clutched in his hand. And who can forget letters on the set behind Theresa May tumbling at a Tory Party conference, perhaps forecasting the monumental public relations and historical failure of her Brexit plans and her demise.

Janet Jackson’s carefully choreographed, escaped breast at the Super Bowl resulted in her being pilloried rather than selling millions of extra records. It didn’t do much for Judy Finnigan either when one of hers was snapped after it came loose on a night out.

Older readers may recall in the sixties the contumely over PJ Proby’s repeatedly bursting trousers, which effectively ended his career. We were more sniffy then.

The royal family, or rather the ex-members of it – Meghan and Harry – went from being idols to villains after lecturing us about saving the planet then playing their parts in ending it by hopping on a series of planes.

But the crown must go to – and doesn’t he wish it would! – to the fun-loving royal known as Randy Andy. Having been embroiled in the Epstein affair, accused of having sex with a teenage prostitute, he decided to give a TV interview intending to deny the whole thing and burnish his image.

It did neither, although it was wonderful PR for Pizza Express, where Andrew claimed to be in the Woking branch with daughter Beatrice on the late afternoon of the supposed illicit liaison that night at the Tramp nightclub in London.

Prince Andrew has since, in the regal way the royals do it, been disappeared. Although no-one is too anxious to find him.