It’s a dilemma that every one of us in PR has to face from time to time. You’re sitting on a campaign idea that you know is going to upset a few people, but it’s simply just so good that you feel you really have to run with it.

This is exactly the issue that the community of Fruita, in the US state of Colorado, is hotly debating after a pair of local historians came up with a controversial marketing idea to raise awareness of the area.

In an initial bid to promote their own book about the city, local couple Steve and Denise Hight decided to distribute 500 stickers, which made a cheeky play on the familiar greeting Welcome to Fruita by turning it into a logo bearing the text-speak expletive WTF.

The brazen double entendre has proven such a big hit that the duo have gone ahead and ordered another 1,500 of the stickers and are also planning to print a range of T-shirts featuring the logo.

And now council officials are looking into adopting the logo as part of the city’s official promotional campaign, much to the dismay of local political correctness sticklers who have branded the slogan as crude and inappropriate.

In many ways we would have to agree with the opponents of the proposals, in that an expletive is not exactly the ideal association that you’d want with your home city or town.

However, from a commercial perspective you only have to look at the national and international media interest in the story so far to realise that the idea has great marketing potential and would put Fruita on the PR map for a very long while to come.