Mistakes. We all make them and when the mistake is made by a big brand it is more difficult than ever to make it go away.
But what’s really noticeable these days is that often it’s not the mistake that’s important, it’s how you deal with it. Every brand (with a handful of exceptions) is there to drive a business. So what do you do when the brand decision and the business decision are directly conflicting?
Today Asda was in the news for inadvertently publicising a £75 discount on their website. Of course a brand can legally withdraw this sort of thing and not go through with the sale. The impact of this has been some fairly negatively PR which has made it to the front of BBC news.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10312959.stm
And it’s difficult to argue with the business case. If you legally don’t have to sell the goods you were offering at a loss then why take the hit?
But compare this with what happened to Zappos’s sister site in the US last month. They made a similar error which amounted to a $1.6million loss (compared with the Asda loss which seemingly is in the low thousands of pounds if you believe their spokesperson).
http://econsultancy.com/blog/5960-zappos-lives-up-to-its-reputation-for-customer-service
But because of Zappos’s absoulte belief in ‘customer first’ they came out and said “our balls up – we’ll honour all purchases”. And off the back of that they get large volumes of positive PR and stay true to their brand values.
http://about.zappos.com/our-unique-culture/zappos-core-values
What this really highlights is the difficulty in making qualitative marketing decisions when faced with a quantifiable business case. Asda knew that they could save several thousand pounds by not honouring the incorrect purchases. They knew that they might have got positive or negative PR depending on how they handled it but this would all have been speculation. So they went with the business case. But given that they claim to be ‘saving you money every day’ they could easily have made a lot of positive mileage out of honouring these mistaken sales.
This is of course if the decision went anywhere near someone with a marketing hat on. Could you quantify the case for letting the sales go with any certainty? I’m not sure if I’d have won the battle faced with a spreadsheet with a number at the bottom.
What would you have done? I would like to think I’d have behaved like Zappos because I come from a marketing background and I’m sure my business consultant friends would have taken the Asda route every time.
Every case needs to be taken on its merits but brands need to understand that increasingly, every business decision has a marketing effect. And just because that marketing effect can’t be measured or predicted as accurately, doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do.
