Brandjack News

Boar's Head in listeria crisis

Boar's Head is an upmarket brand in the deli meats and cheeses market. Last month it recalled over 200,000 lbs (almost 100,000 KG) of meat following a listeria outbreak.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported multiple "non compliances" against the company had been noted in a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Report referring to 57 different days between August 2023 and July 2024. While regulators sometimes claim they are under resourced and cannot cope with the number of inspections required to keep the food chain hygienic, in this case the USDA seems to have been conducting the inspections, but follow up action seems to have been sparse. 

We certainly don't have all the facts in this case, but we do know that there are often failures in regulation for a number of different reasons:

1. Regulatory Capture: sometimes the regulators end up acting in the interests of the regulated industry, not the public. 
2. Inadequate enforcement powers: sometimes regulators have the will to enforce, but lack the powers.
3. Over-regulation: sometimes regulations are so onerous it is impossible to avoid breaching them, so regulated industries treat the fines as an inevitable cost of business. 
4. Inadequate management: sometimes the business lacks the capacity to reform itself. 

We don't know which, if any, of the above applies in this instance. 

What does seem likely is that greater transparency would have helped. With numerous breaches of regulations, including some which are serious, such as "mold, mildew, and insects", the company would seem to have a clear interest in cleaning things up even if fines were not administered or were inadequate. The risk of litigation and reputational damage are plainly significant in this instance, and were even before the deadly listeria outbreak, which will be connected with the issue in the public mind, even if the hygiene failures did not cause the deaths. 

Ultimately, reports such as this are covered by the Freedom of Information Act. The information does get out, but if that is after extensive delays the company may have already improved the situation before anyone has a chance to act on the information. A hurried report, to which the company has not had a chance to respond, could easily cause a lot of harm if it was incorrect or lacked critical context, but proceeding as quickly as possible towards full transparency seems to be of great value to the public. 

If the USDA had unequivocal evidence of serious hygiene problems last year, relying on whistleblowers to put the matter in the public domain is a policy failure. If this information was not publicly shared early in the process, we should ask why not. 

Four Tops singer sues hospital

There's often tension about whether or not to apologize in a crisis. Attorneys will generally advise not to. Communications professionals are more likely to favor the idea. But one thing should be clear. If you apologize, you need to be sincere and transparent. You need to accept the scale of what has gone wrong. The breaking news about Alexander Morris of the Four Tops seems to exhibit the worst of all worlds. Here's the story:

Morris went to hospital in Michigan with clear signs of cardiac distress. When he identified himself as a member of the legendary Motown group, it seems that staff did not believe him. They put him on psychiatric watch and into a straitjacket. 

The hospital has not commented, as there's a strong chance of litigation. Morris claims racial discrimination, among other things.

It's not clear how hospital staff got from (wrongly, it seems) assessing him as delusional to deciding that he needed to be restrained. 

Since we don't have enough information to judge the hospital's actions on that point just yet, let's look instead at the offer to compensate Morris with a $25 gift card. (For a retailer, not for future hospital visits). 

Attorneys usually advise against apologies because they seem to acknowledge liability. Offers of compensation are usually made "without prejudice", meaning you can't hold the fact that they made the offer as an admission of liability. 

Communicators often advise in favor of apology, because there is real evidence that it eases bad feeling and makes litigation less likely. 

The problem with an offer of compensation that is derisory if that it seems to accept liability without mitigating any bad feeling. 

This was not just a situation in which a couple of nurses giggled at his claim to be a member of a prominent singing group. It started a process which led to a straitjacket.

Maybe the hospital plans to claim that he became belligerent and the straitjacket decision was justified. If so, they should be clear that they stand by this decision, and the compensation is only because of the misunderstanding about his identity. A better approach would be to immediately apologize for the mistake about his identity, but say they are still investigating the decision to put him in a straitjacket, and will be transparent when that investigation is complete. 

Media holding back blame in bridge collapse

American media do not seem to have jumped straight in to allocating blame for the collision of the Dali with the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore. The bridge collapsed almost immediately. 

As an analyst of media coverage, not an engineer, Brandjack News can't help wondering why the media are being so reticent. This was not the case with, for example, the BP oil spill in 2010. 

Certainly, the ownership and responsibility in this case is complicated. The ship is owned and operated by a company based in Singapore (Synergy Group) and chartered by the Danish logistics company, Maersk. Maersk's branding is clearly visible on the containers in many of the media visuals. 

But complexity was an issue in 2010, too. The oil rig was owned by one company and operated by another. Several partners were involved in the construction. But the media almost immediately latched on to BP as the target of all blame. 

Perhaps the media are awaiting reports from the NTSB, which investigates transportation disasters. Maybe, but waiting for the facts is not standard operating procedure. The story is current NOW, and the media usually want a villain when they are conducting their initial reports. 

Perhaps the biggest difference is that in 2010 the media could identify as villain a business with a well known brand: BP. In this case, both Synergy Group and Maersk are huge global businesses, but few consumers deal with them directly. 

Maersk has also seen barely a blip in its share price since the accident, though it has been on a slight downward trend this year in any case. The fall on March 26th was barely perceptible, and the price that day was up on a week previously. It has recovered slightly since then. It seems as though markets are not expecting Maersk to face a big liability. 

What if flying is too safe?

By Quentin Langley

The terrifying accident in which a door plug came off an Alaska Airlines Boeing Max 9 while in flight has heavily hit the company's reputation. People are calling for regulation to be tightened and for the FAA to have more resources to inspect Boeing facilities. Websites are offering people the chance to exclude flights with Max 9's from their searches. 

That sounds sensible, at first. But let's bear a few things in mind.

1. Terrifying as this incident was, no one was killed. 
2. Flying is, by a huge margin, the safest way to travel. Literally years at a time can go by without anyone being killed by an accident in flight. 

What if flying is too safe? 

What could I possibly mean by "too safe"? Surely we all want flights to be as safe as possible? Well, no, we don't. That's what people say with regard to pretty much all decisions, but it is not how people actually make decisions. We want a reasonable level of safety.

If increasing regulations make it slower to manufacture new planes, then longer periods will pass between replacing old equipment. Slowing down the modernization of the fleet could actually make flying more dangerous. 

But it isn't just that. If you require more frequent checks of planes between flights then you will increase delays of flights and increase the cost of flying. Cost and convenience are the two most important factors in people's decision making when deciding how to travel. Safety barely features. Increasing prices and delays will push people to travel by some other means.

And traveling by some other means is vastly more dangerous. This is not even close. Every form of transport, including walking, has more deaths per billion passenger kilometers than flying. Walking is actually the second most dangerous, after motorcycling. (It is not a remotely close second). 

The problem here is that the regulatory brief is all wrong and so are the incentives. The FAA has to minimize the number of people killed in air accidents. Its leadership will be lambasted in the media if accidents seem to be on the rise. But if the cost of each life saved in air accidents is that many - probably hundreds - of additional people will be killed on the roads, then flying is too safe. It has reached a level of safety so absurdly out of proportion with other modes of transport that the imbalance is killing people. 

Yes, I found reports of the Alaskan Airlines incident scary. I didn't even know planes had "plugged" doorways. Apparently it is because if the airline puts in more and smaller seats it is required to have more doors. Come to think of it, perhaps that is a regulation which should be reviewed as creating more danger than safety. But whether that regulation makes sense or not is something that should be determined by data, not by panic. One reason air incidents - even those with no fatalities - get massively reported is that they are extremely rare. 

So let's go with data. And the data suggest that safety would be served by making flying cheaper. If that means a handful of extra deaths in flight, more than balanced by hundreds of lives saved on the roads, we should go with that. 

 

 

Disney fires Majors
Disney, which owns the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, has dismissed actor Jonathan Majors, who has been playing Kang the Conqueror, the new adversary of the franchise, and was due to appear in this role in the fifth movie of the Avengers series.
Majors has just been convicted of assault and harassment charges against his then girlfriend, though the jury acquitted on some other charges.
Disney has been praised for acting swiftly, on the day of the verdict. Since the trial has been ongoing, Disney certainly knew that there would be a verdict shortly, and it would not have been hard to agree two alternative statements well in advance. The verdict did not come out of nowhere, and there was plenty of time to prepare.
Marvel now needs to either recast the role or change the creative direction of Avengers 5, which was previously known as The Kang Dynasty. The change in title suggests that they are keeping their options open.
Action movies in particular need to be careful about promoting as stars (even portraying villains) actors with convictions for acts of violence, so the decision to fire him was probably an easy one, if potentially very expensive.

The Russell Brand

Writing about the brand of someone whose name is "Brand" opens the door to some possible confusion. Despite the name of this blog - and the title of my book - I have long been clear that I prefer the word "reputation" to the word "brand", since it connotes exactly the same to the lay audience as it does to academic and professional commentators. 

Russell Brand is now being demonetized by some platforms - notably YouTube - and advertisers are individually boycotting his content on other platforms. They are doing so because he has been accused of sexual assault and rape over incidents some years ago, when he was still prominent in the mainstream media. 

It is worth noting that he has not been convicted of any crime.

It is also worth reminding ourselves why his career in the mainstream media was curtailed. He was suspended by the BBC over an incident in which he and another entertainer phoned the actor, Andrew Sachs, and left a lewd message on his voicemail. The message boasted that Brand had had sex with the actor's granddaughter. (This was actually something said by the other entertainer, who not worth naming in this context).

The young woman has recently reconfirmed that the encounter did take place, and that it was consensual. Since the radio show of which this was a part was not live, but recorded, the BBC is open to considerable criticism for suspending the two presenters, when the corporation itself took the decision to broadcast the offensive material, knowing its content. 

Legally, Brand is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He cannot be imprisoned without conviction in a court of law to the appropriate standard: beyond reasonable doubt. 

Any person or business which wishes to avoid dealing with him is legally and morally allowed to do so. They can do so just because they think he is unpleasant: though that case seemed clear to me before these latest allegations. 

YouTube, like the BBC before it, has put itself in a difficult position. It was happy to deal with Brand before these allegations but no longer is. That makes it pretty clear that it is these unproven allegations that have made the difference. So, what is its policy with regard to unproven allegations of criminal conduct? Are these just judgments it makes up as and when they arise? Is that an adequate policy for a generally open-access platform?

YouTube is not the BBC. Its typical policy is to allow anyone to post material. The material is not edited by YouTube and carries no stamp of approval. That's a good strategy, and one it should probably maintain. Generally, content producers with strong followings can earn money from their content. Flat Earthers do, whereas Holocaust deniers are generally banned. 

YouTube's own guidelines for monetization refer to the content, not the content provider.  You are advised to avoid such things as "inappropriate language" or violence. It doesn't say that the same content is acceptable from some content providers but not from someone the platform views as morally suspect. 

Plainly, YouTube is in a difficult position. Some content is unlawful in some jurisdictions. Holocaust denial is illegal in much of continental Europe, for example, but the platform can't simply ban any content that is unlawful in some places. Criticizing the government of China is unlawful in China.  

It seems a responsible principle that someone should not be able to cash in on crimes. If a person has been convicted of a crime, then creating content about that crime is something YouTube should not allow. But, even when convicted, should a person be forever denied access to making new content?

The BBC is under no obligation to commission programs from Brand. Advertisers are under no obligation to support his content. But a blanket banning or demonetizing of his content by a generally open-access platform seems unwise.

If YouTube had asked my advice, I would have said demonetize anything he says about the allegations themselves, but otherwise leave his channel alone. 

Brands taking stands

Should brands take stands on controversial topics?

The first question is, why would you? It is inherent to the word “controversial” that you are going to irritate at least some people. Most of the time, customers who agree with you are not going to buy any extra product and some people will buy less or stop altogether, so it is likely to be a net damage to your business.

Of course, sometimes you have to. I don’t mean, in this instance, that the moral case is imperative, though might be true sometimes. I simply mean that there is no alternative. For example, if you are a cosmetics brand, you either test on animals or you don’t. There’s not a way of avoiding the issue. If you have no policy on the issue, then are almost certainly using ingredients that were tested on animals. Do you provide healthcare and other benefits to the partners of your gay employees? Again, there simply has to be an answer to the question, though in the case of some, usually smaller, businesses, it may not have arisen. Such questions are inherent to your business operations.

But putting out a statement of your views on, say, abortion, if you are not in the business of providing gynecological services or pharmaceuticals, is necessarily optional. And exercising that option will alienate a portion of your publics. Taking a stand on issues that are outside the scope of your business operations is a risky strategy, and is more likely to hurt your business than to help it.

Let’s hone in, for the moment, on customers, though there’s a case for saying that longer term stakeholders such as staff or investors may be more motivated by these issues.

Are your customers typical of the general population? Starbucks was vocal about providing gay partner benefits back when gay marriage was much more contentious than it is today. The concept had been rejected even in liberal states such as Washington and California (twice). But as a hip, urban, brand, the company may have concluded that its customers were generally more liberal than the US as a whole. Disney had, much more quietly, been providing gay partner benefits for much longer. Its customers are mostly families with young children. It probably did so because customers don’t care much about staff benefits whereas staff do, and it was recruiting singers, actors, dancers, almost all of whom probably had gay friends, even if they were not gay themselves.

Disney is also different from many businesses because its assets include some compelling IP. Many children really want to go to its parks and consume its products. Those products simply aren’t available from a competitor, and parents might have been very uncomfortable explaining to children why they wanted to boycott Disney.

Why would Bud Light decide to use a prominent trans influencer? They were presumably aware that this would be contentious with a significant segment of their customer base. My guess is they were trying to appeal to new customers. If so, it seems to have backfired, with significant boycotts by existing customers.

Trying to appeal to new customers under the same brand name always runs the risk that you will reduce your appeal to existing customers without attracting many new ones. Complete repositioning strategies are hard to pull off.

So, here’s a list of questions brands considering tackling a controversial issue should consider:

1. Do you have to? Is there a way you could simply not be involved in the matter?
2. Is this going to alienate a significant public?
3. Is it something that really matters to a stakeholder group? This doesn’t mean just that the issue matters. Does it matter to them that you should take a stand on it?
4. Are your publics – customers, staff, investors, etc. – in line with the general public on this issue, or they likely to be outliers?
5. How competitive is your market? Can people who disagree with you easily replace your product with something similar.

On the whole, I would say there has to be a compelling reason to take a stand. Otherwise, don’t.

Hiatus over

After a hiatus, Brandjack News is once again covering brandjacking, ESG, crisis, business ethics, and digital communications. 

Are people really confusing Corona beer and the coronavirus?

By Quentin Langley

According to Google Trends, searches for some variation of "corona beer virus" have increased dramatically in recent weeks. But does that mean that people are confusing the beer and the virus. 

First, the confession. I am one of those searchers. Obviously, there are few people who write professionally about crisis management, and particularly the social media aspects of crisis, as I do. But my example demonstrates one of the weaknesses of Google Trends as a guide to what people are thinking. The fact that someone has searched doesn't tell you why the person did that search. 

Significant numbers of people are undoubtedly searching in order to find amusing content about how stupid other people are, and in doing so contributing to the number of people who participated in the 'dumb' search on Google. 

Furthermore, the beer brand has been deliberately contributing to the profile of this "confusion" by creating its own amusing content on the topic. You can be sure the brand would not be doing this if it was losing sales from people who feared catching the virus. 

The makers of Corona beer have also mooted the idea of starting a fund to have the virus renamed "budlightvirus". 

Google has a pretty good idea the general topics people are discussing, but the brand owner has much better information on whether or not this is changing anyone's behavior. It seems it isn't, and the beer is earning kudos from its willingness to participate in these discussions with good humor. 

 

Boeing's a la carte safety options

By Quentin Langley

At a restaurant you might order the Tuscan Pizza with no onions but with extra black olives. Alternatively, the whole menu might be a la carte, and you build your own pizza or salad. Either way, some sort of negotiation has happened between the customer and the restaurant over what, exactly, is going to be delivered, and while both bear responsibility for the result, the customer is the one ordering. We all understand the process. 

If you are buying a car, however, the negotiation may not be equal. A car manufacturer would not usually make key safety features optional, but if it did - passenger airbags, for example - it would be transparent about it. The manufacturer will not make engine parts a la carte, because customers won't necessarily understand the significance of them or know which are essential to the operation of the car.

Purchasing aircraft is even more complex. But, in some ways, it has more in common with buying a pizza than buying a car. There isn't, or shouldn't be, the imbalance of information. An airline will have buyers who are just as expert in air safety as the manufacturer's sellers. But that only works if the manufacturer is transparent. 

Brandjack News was not in the forefront of the first wave of commentators criticizing Boeing over recent crashes. It seems a little odd to offer an aircraft for sale without key safety features, which you then sell at a premium price. But how different is this from agreeing to sell an aircraft without those features at the request of the customer? Trying to fit either of these scenarios into a restaurant model is a fool's errand. The negotiations involve teams of experts, probably over some years, agreeing the specifications. Both sides are intimately involved but, ultimately, it is the customer who decides whether safety is important enough to be included in the order. If the manufacturer was being transparent. 

But, it seems as if matters were even more complex than I assumed. The Wall Street Journal has reported:

Plane maker Boeing Co. didn’t tell Southwest Airlines Co.when the carrier began flying 737 MAX jets in 2017 that a standard safety feature, found on earlier models and designed to warn pilots about malfunctioning sensors, had been deactivated.

So, you can opt to have some new safety features excluded, but if you do, some existing features, which are actually installed in the plane, will be deactivated. 

At present, it is not actually clear why this was even done. If, as the report suggests, it was done without telling Southwest, it cannot have been as part of pressure to get them to buy the additional features. More likely, the existing sensors interact with the new features, and were deactivated because the new features aren't present. 

If anyone at Southwest knew about this deactivation, the information certainly didn't get to the people who actually needed it. Southwest's manuals for pilots were wrong, telling them that sensors would warn them of a problem when the sensors in question were turned off. 

A separate report in the Journal tells of how investigators have now received information from several whistle-blowers at Boeing. 

It is not yet clear what these whistle-blowers are saying about blame, but things are beginning to look very bad indeed for one of the most storied names in aviation.