Business Blunders 1
AT Enigin we try to make the right decision about marketing and customer service - hopefully we get them right, but some of the biggest companies and organisations globally prove again and again that you need to be careful, very careful, when you enact policies, change images, use services, make statements, shout out PR and even proof read.
To remind all businesses, Enigin and Enigin Distributors included - here are some the Business Blunders committed over the last 12 months - This is Part 1:
Walmart fires Heather Ravenstein, a customer service manager at a store in Wichita, Kan., for preventing a shoplifter from walking out with a $600 computer. Though the thief let go of the PC after punching and kicking her, Ravenstein was terminated the next day, says Walmart spokeswoman Anna Taylor, for “violat[ing] company policy as it pertains to how we treat people in our stores.”Several top executives at Chicago-based Tribune Company resign from the bankrupt media conglomerate after reports surface of frat-house behavior among company brass. Among other notorious incidents, CEO Randy Michaels allegedly offers a waitress, in the presence of other company employees, $100 to bare her chest; chief innovation officer Lee Abrams sends a company-wide e-mail that includes a link to a parody video from The Onion in which a woman empties a liquor bottle on her exposed breasts; and a memo announcing the hiring of a senior vice president describes her (fictionally) as “a former waitress at Knockers—the Place for Hot Racks and Cold Brews.”
Documents from a lawsuit against Dell unsealed by a federal judge in November reveal that, after shipping nearly 12 million potentially defective computers equipped with faulty capacitors from 2003 to 2005, the company had provided its sales force with instructions that included pointers such as “Don’t bring this to customer’s attention proactively” and “Emphasize uncertainty.”
Health-information website WrongDiagnosis.com, which attempts to help patients who believe their medical practitioners may have reached erroneous conclusions, offers a “Patient Profile Survey” that poses questions such as, “At what age did you first notice symptoms of Death?” “How long after you noticed symptoms of Death were you officially diagnosed?” And finally, “Are you happy with your experiences of medical care for Death?”
To write a white paper that will guide British government policies on obesity, alcohol, and diet-related diseases, the UK Dept of Health enlists the aid of businesses including McDonald’s, KFC, Kellogg’s, Mars, and booze conglomerate Diageo. PepsiCo is chosen to chair the subcommittee on calories, while the “alcohol responsibility” group is helmed by the Wine and Spirit Trade Association.
The National Institutes of Health launches a program called We Can!—short for “Ways to Enhance Children’s Activity & Nutrition—with the stated goal of “improving food choices, increasing physical activity, and reducing screen time.” To promote the campaign, the group holds a video contest on the We Can! YouTube channel and encourages kids to vote for their favorite videos on the We Can! Facebook page.
Thanks to a misprint on boxes of Ochocinco’s, a limited-edition cereal featuring Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco and benefitting a charity called Feed the Children, callers looking to contact the nonprofit are instead directed to a phone-sex line. “Trying to do good and got messed up,” tweets Ochocinco, “of all numbers why that one!!!”
Designers of a new Las Vegas resort called the Vdara are surprised to discover that the swanky reflective-glass surface of the building has a special feature not included in the plans: Like a giant magnifying glass, it focuses sunlight directly on the pool area. One guest says the beam burned his scalp and melted a plastic newspaper bag, telling ABC News that hotel staffers jokingly referred to it as “the death ray.”
After Long Island, N.Y. daily Newsday creates a clever ad for the iPad that goes viral on the Web, Apple reportedly shows its gratitude by sending the paper a cease-and-desist letter. What stuck in Steve Jobs’ craw? In the ad, Newsday says its iPad app “is better than the newspaper in all kinds of ways … except for one”— then makes the “one” clear when a man reading the digital Newsday uses it to swat a fly, shattering the device.
As officials from all 50 states investigate shortcuts taken by banks in repossessing hundreds of thousands of homes, it becomes clear that the workers handling the foreclosures were often less than qualified. Among other telling details, a Wells Fargo employee testifies that she was signing 300 to 500 foreclosure documents per day without bothering to read them; a firm hired to review documents for Citigroup and GMAC is found to have outsourced the work to companies in the Philippines and Guam; and at JPMorgan Chase, in-house hires were so wet behind the ears that they were referred to internally as “Burger King kids.”
Two months and roughly 3 million barrels of spilled crude into the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster—and fresh off criticism for saying “I’d like my life back” after the accident had cost 11 workers theirs—BP CEO Tony Hayward adds insult to injury by spending the day off the Isle of Wight aboard his $270,000 Farr 52 racing yacht. Stunned reactions to the sailing holiday from environmentalists, U.S. government officials, and Gulf Coast residents range from “insulting” to “the height of arrogance” to “man, that ain’t right.”
TSA screeners in Chattanooga, Tenn., conduct a pat-down search on three-year-old Mandy Simon, much to the chagrin of her TV reporter dad, whose video of the encounter helps to fuel the public’s anger toward the outfit securing our nation’s airports. The incident began when the younger Simon objected to putting her teddy bear through the X-ray scanner.
Chrysler debuts a stirring, patriotic commercial during the 2010 World Cup, featuring George Washington himself driving a Stars-and-Stripes-festooned Dodge Challenger into battle against the British. What could be more American? Unfortunately, not a Dodge Challenger. As Consumer Reports is quick to point out, the Challenger was engineered in Germany and built in Canada by a company owned in part by Italian carmaker Fiat.
New York–based Echometrix settles charges with the Federal Trade Commission that the company had failed to adequately inform customers that data gathered by its FamilySafe Sentry Parental Control software—intended to help parents protect their children from potential predators by monitoring their online activity—would be sold to third-party marketers. The company had been using the data to fuel a program called Pulse, a market-research tool offering insights drawn from social media websites, blogs, and chat forums.
Huggies unveils Little Movers Jeans Diapers, printed to look like denim, with the slogan “The Coolest You’ll Look Pooping Your Pants.”
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