Comments on: Terrible Corporate Apologies Product Managers Can Learn From

By: Great Apologies Product Managers Can Learn From. (Plus, One Of My Own.) | Product Management Meets Pop Culture

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:12:21 +0000

[...] time we looked at three truly terrible ways businesses have apologized to [...]

By: Saeed Khan

Saeed Khan — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:30:58 +0000

One of the issues with corporate apologies is legal liability. A lot of companies don’t or can’t explicitly say sorry for something because of the potential law suits that can arise because the apology could also be seen by courts (and litigious citizens) as admission of liability.

I doubt the Pepsi example could have resulted in any legal liabilities, but who knows. There have been successful lawsuits for much less.

By: Christopher Cummings

Christopher Cummings — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:19:51 +0000

@Patrick – I can concede that point. But it still feels very cheap to me. Given the attention they were getting, wouldn’t their response have been retweeted by folks and appended with the appropriate hashtag anyway? It feels like Pepsi was trying 2 hard 2 be hip, and missing an opportunity to engage in a real dialog in a more appropriate venue.

By: Larry McKeogh

Larry McKeogh — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:06:07 +0000

Chris,
Excellent reminder on how to handle an embarrassing situation. As I was reading I kept thinking back to the 1994 debacle with Intel and the floating point error. Intel, after some arm twisting acknowledged the floating point issue. Rather than fess up they proceeded to denigrate their user base by claiming it was not serious and would not affect most users. To resolve the issue they then required proof before replacement. http://bit.ly/4tHbuK. Ultimately they did finally get it but by then they had more problems than a minor processor error.

As I was searching to refresh my memory I came across a couple of other more recent apologies and how not to handle courtesy of Intel.
http://www.ecogeek.org/component/content/article/1900

Hopefully I will never have such a situation, but if i do, I may just seek out Intel cases and do the opposite.

I look forward to your suggestions on how to handle such a tricky situation.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:35:45 +0000

Not to defend Pepsi too much here, but they could have just been using the hashtag as a way to reach the core audience. If everybody out there complaining about Pepsi is watching that hashtag, then an apology aimed at those people is most effective on the same conversation thread.

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:15:02 +0000

Nice post. I remember reading that DreamHost “apology” letter. Good thing they were quick to send my refund, but I left them after I received that email.