Sorry shouldn't be the hardest word
It’s been often observed that we live in a culture that has come to be increasingly defined by blame. The introduction of ‘no win no fee’ legal contracts has, in the eyes of many, not only fundamentally shifted the focus of our justice system but also altered many other aspects of daily life.
Right now the blame vultures are circling far and wide in a journey to allocate responsibility for the current economic climate and they’re having a whale of a time.
One of the many unfortunate side effects of this culture is the rise in defensiveness – when everyone looks to blame everyone else, it’s almost inevitable that we all become much less willing to say sorry. The blame game often works through the domino effect – A blames B, but it wasn’t really B’s fault, it was C after all. People and organisations are much less willing to stand up and say they made a mistake.
Which makes the very public admission by Marks and Spencer that it got its bra pricing strategy wrong a little more notable than usual. A series of ads admitting ‘We boobed’ has been taken out in national newspapers. The £2 additional charge for larger bras has been rescinded and, what’s more, there’s now 25% off all bras for a limited period (and no, I'm not on commission in case you're wondering).
M&S has always been great about returns, it’s something that I’ve heard so often over the years, ‘the great thing is they’ll take it back if you don’t like it’. Nowadays that’s become very much the norm, but for a long time it was a hallmark of the M&S brand.
You can often tell a lot more about a person, an organisation and a brand when things go wrong. How mistakes and problems are dealt with will reveal the real self in a way that good times and easy situations don’t. Just ask Gordon Brown.
This is why M&S wins out for this latest campaign:
1. They’ve recognised that they made a mistake. OK, they may have been facing pressure groups and a revolt from shareholders, but we’ve seen plenty of far bigger organisations and individuals ride out far more serious outcries in recent months without bowing to consumer pressure.
2. They’ve made a very public admission, which not only goes out of its way to admit the mistake but is also unreserved, there’s no attempt to back up the apology with a load of excuses, it is what it is.
3. They’ve done it with a degree of humour and charm, it’s not hand wringing, squirming apology, it’s not given through gritted teeth and it’s not long-winded.
4. They’ve backed up their apology with immediate action. All too often we see apologies that are full of empty words and promises and we’ve all become a bit sceptical as to what an apology is really worth. Not in this case, the monetary value and discount is there for all to see.
Now, let’s be clear; this is a move driven by financial and commercial gain, M&S hasn’t done this out of the goodness of its heart. Of course it hasn’t. I’m not holding this up as a worthy and wonderful social gesture.
What I am saying is that M&S has had the insight, understanding and confidence to see that it had inadvertently created on the one hand a crisis for the brand, but on the other hand a great opportunity to make a really powerful statement about the M&S brand, its personality and its beliefs.
In a way the brand emerges stronger than ever from this little episode (I really daren’t call it a storm in a DD cup).
There are lessons in this for many other organisations in these interesting times in which we live. Saying sorry is no bad thing, brands are built on relationships and like all relationships it’s about sticking together through the good times and the bad. But both sides have to work hard at it.