The Apple Conundrum

Posted by Deb on Thursday, February 9th, 2012 , Posted in Brand Strategy, Clarity Posts, Featured, Reputation Management, Sustainability , No Comments »

“I’m ashamed to say I own an iPhone.”

My husband said that to me as we started through Salt Lake City’s airport on Jan. 26th, making a connection from Seattle to New Orleans. He’d just asked if I’d read The New York Times “In China, the Human Costs That Are Built Into an iPad“ article on Apple’s manufacturing in China, which he’d finished inflight. I’d read it at breakfast before heading to SeaTac.

I had to agree with him. Particularly since I don’t just own an iPhone, but also an iPad, an iMac, and a brand spanking new MacBook Air. Kind of an Apple gal. I think I’m on my third iPhone. If you admire innovation and products designed to work really well for their customers, it’s tough not to like Apple. But if you want to support companies you believe are doing the right thing in the big picture, it’s tough to like them. And that’s my problem: I do both.

I try really hard to be the change I want to see. I believe the most powerful vote I have is my dollar. The gadget girl in me was long been in conflict with the green girl. I love cool new technology. My top concern in life is the environment. I know replacing stuff with ever newer and more complex stuff is bad for the planet. I know taking my old electronics to recycling does not compensate for my consumption. I know there’s a reason the slogan goes on the order of “reduce, reuse, recycle.”

The entire consumer electronics industry is built on people utterly ignoring that mantra. Apple, in particular, encourages customers to discard the old to make way for the new by practically forcing it.  I’ve held on to Windows computers for ages, limping through upgrades that have kept machines on life support until I finally couldn’t take it any more. That’s much tougher with Apples.

My Apple addiction was glaring me in the face. Did I need to march straight back to the Apple store when I got home and return my MacBook?

It wasn’t that I was oblivious to some of Apple’s bad press from China before the New York Times series. I read a lot of news. I knew about the explosions. I’d heard complaints. I’d wondered if I was doing the right thing buying Apple. But was any brand truly better? Everything’s made in China, right?

Practically speaking, yes. (By the way, if you want even more insight into the working conditions in China, read Paul Midler’s ”Poorly Made in China.” I picked it up at the suggestion of an investor friend who’d just been there.) So this conundrum is one every consumer electronics purchaser faces. The Sustainable Business Forum published a very strong piece on this Feb. 6th called “Apple’s China Problem — And Ours.”  This is not, Marc Gunther writes, an Apple problem. It’s our problem.

In 2003, Kogan Page published a book called “Beyond Branding,” edited by Nicholas Ind. It’s been years since I read it, but as I recall, the basic premise is that brands must adopt a wider social perspective to remain relevant to a public expecting integrity and transparency. I hadn’t realized that businesses, at the time the book was penned, accounted for 51 of the largest 100 economic entities in the world. (Another factoid from Sustainable Business Forum‘s article: Foxconn, one of Apple’s biggest manufacturers, employs 1.2 MILLION people!) Granted, the authors weren’t expecting change overnight, but here we are, nine years later, having endured the financial industry meltdown and watched in horror as oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico with seemingly little changed.

But it can, if we accept that it’s our problem.

Customers and shareholders are powerful entities when they mass. I’d love to see Apple provide some leadership here. It is one of the most powerful brands in the world. Its profit margins per employee leave plenty of room to return great shareholder value AND do good — something the company’s more or less ignored throughout its history. But Apple need to know its customers care. So we have to act, too. We can’t continually demand more and more for less and less without recognizing the consequences of our consumption. Constantly demanding more for less means screwing somebody, and if not somebody than something, like the planet.

Why are we as consumers okay with that? Can’t we do better, too?

 

 

3 Brand Reputation Management Lessons from Susan G. Komen

Posted by Deb on Monday, February 6th, 2012 , Posted in Brand Marketing, Clarity Posts, crisis communications, Featured, Reputation Management , No Comments »

A great deal has been well and thoughtfully written about Susan G. Komen’s brand debacle. Woven through many of these analyses is a sense of amazement that Komen could have gotten themselves into this mess in the first place. Through it all, I keep wondering: who was at the table when this decision was being discussed? And what in the world were they thinking?

One of the most basic tasks in creating a crisis communications plan — something I’ve eternally advocated every organization of every size should have — is thinking through a whole bunch of “what if?” scenarios. If you cut through all the crap and get right down to it, threats to a brand’s reputation typically fall into just two categories: 1) ones thrown at you out of the blue (remember how “going Postal” originated) and 2) ones you really should have anticipated. For Komen, this was one of the latter. It all could have been avoided by having the right people at the table asking “what if?”

There are tremendous lessons to be learned here for any organization dealing with a potentially divisive or high impact decision.

Lesson #1: Get Specific

One size never has and never will fit all. Major decisions require extensive debate. The Komen leadership team clearly should have spent more time debating what constituted an”investigation.” Let’s face it. Examples, including some extreme ones, should have been put on the table and played out as potential scenarios to understand how tough it could be to manage those situations and how those various scenarios would affect Komen’s brand reputation. Had the leadership team done this with diligence, I’m willing to bet they would have seen this type of situation coming and would have articulated a detailed list of either specific types of investigations or specific investigative bodies within the policy itself. Spend the time to debate through a series of “what if” scenarios to make sure you know how the policy you’re about to set could play out in when implemented.

Lesson #2: Put Yourselves in Others’ Shoes

Komen’s decision to apply its new “no investigations” policy to Planned Parenthood was a second opportunity to really think this through. Apparently, that again didn’t happen. There was no possibility that Planned Parenthood wasn’t going to make a huge deal out of Komen’s decision to stop their grants. This is a difficult fundraising environment, we’re talking about a lot of money, and the grants funded a vital service — breast exams for women with no other service option.  Komen has no excuse for not anticipating Planned Parenthood’s response. All they had to do to anticipate it was think. Every organization should have a standard procedure for announcing big decisions internally and externally and a strick rule the procedure be followed without exception. That standard procedure should always include developing a Q&A to help prepare spokespeople. Even the simple act of creating the questions would have prepared Komen for the inevitability of what happened here. There’s really no excuse for being blindsided by something obvious.

Lesson #3: Get Out In Front of News

Never, ever let someone else frame your news when it has implications for your brand’s reputation. Orchestrate it with the same diligence you plan an enormous event — like the Run for The Cure. Prepare your spokesperson to handle the obvious and nasty questions. And then break it yourself so you have a chance to position the news. Otherwise, you look like a deer in headlights, which just proves to the world that you hadn’t thought your decision through and weren’t in the last bit prepared. Just like Komen.