Do Apologies Work?
by anitafacundo
In his blog, “Culpa Marketing: How to Win By Publicizing Screwups”, Rohit Bhargava made an admirable point about how companies should willingly and honestly apologize if they screw up. I thought this was an important topic given that everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone knows how to fix them.
Murphy’s Law claims something will eventually go wrong. So if your company does something wrong, how would you decide what your next step is? Would you come clean? Would you hope no one noticed and ignore it? Or would you acknowledge your mistakes, make amends and figure out how to avoid the same mistake in the future?
You may be asking to yourself how this organizational behaviour topic relates to marketing. Well, Mr. Bhargava explains in his blog a marketing term that relates directly to this:
Culpa Marketing involves strategically using mistakes as an opportunity to rebuild trust by using a more human, direct and authentic style of communication to deliver a heartfelt apology and promise to make changes to solve the problem.
Understanding this can term can turn around a companies future. If marketers can comprehend and apply “Culpa Marketing” steps to a previous mistake, they will have a much higher chance of gaining back a larger market share.
In class we’ve learned about consumer behavior. As marketers we need to continuously be watching and observing our consumers needs and wants. If we screw up and make a mistake, we need to reach out to our consumers, reconnect with them and then implement a solution that is suitable and genuine. This is crucial to the brands image. Only after a company acts upon their solutions to mend their mistakes, will consumers start trusting again. As Mr. Bhargava says, “There is nothing more powerful than a genuine heartfelt apology”.
Check out his blog to see specific example of how JCP, JetBlue and Domino’s Pizza used Culpa Marketing to get back on track: