Has the Dixons 'last place you want to go' campaign backfired?

Us Brits love a bit of tongue in cheek humour but any business which goes down that route in its marketing is playing a risky game.

One such company is electronics retailer Dixons. Anyone in London will have spotted posters recently all over the Tube which take a pot shot at Dixons' rivals. Encouraging customers to browse for a product in competitor stores, they are then told to buy it at the Dixons website. The campaign concludes with the slogan: 'Dixons.co.uk - The last place you want to go'. Here's a video version of the ad with a voiceover by comedian David Mitchell:

I for one think the campaign is a clever one and was impressed when I first saw it. However, remove the context of the story and just display the slogan and I have a somewhat different reaction:

The image above is a screenshot taken of the Dixons website yesterday when 'The last place you want to go' slogan appeared.

News travels fast these days and it was spotted by the Twitter community almost instantly. The reaction from most has been far from positive:

This morning the slogan has been removed from the website. It appears that Dixons has learnt a hard lesson that when coming up with a clever marketing tagline it must work in all situations and contexts. I've called Dixons' PR company and asked for the reasons behind the removal of the slogan. I'm still waiting for their response.

UPDATED (1300 GMT): STATEMENT FROM DIXONS RECEIVED

"Dixons.co.uk has a new tongue in cheek advertising campaign which ran in the south east aimed at drawing attention to the fact that Dixons is now an online pure play brand offering excellent value for money and no longer on the high street.

"As part of that campaign the ad was featured on the home page, but the ad was taken off yesterday and without it the strapline lost its context. The strapline has now been removed from the site."