Stay modest, stay humble. Kudos to brands that acknowledge their mistakes

Sometimes it just happens.

Even the most seasoned brands can make embarrassing blunders. 

Recently, Apple had to apologize for a somewhat dystopian iPad Pro ad that hinted at the destruction of creativity.

Bumble, the dating app, withdrew its ads that mocked celibacy and abstinence among its female audience.

Beauty brand Youthforia faced a lot of criticism for a foundation shade that was considered not inclusive enough.

After backlashes like these, it's not easy to backtrack, but it can be done.

After all, we all make mistakes or face setbacks, right? So can brands. They just need to learn from the lesson.

The mirage of invulnerability is an illusory trap

"Business and leadership is all about relationships. And in any relationship, things go wrong, mistakes are made, ups are followed by downs. The strength of a relationship is not how perfect it is, but how resiliently it deals with the inevitable failures".

And as Albert Einstein said: "A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new". Some mistakes are inevitable when you want to innovate.

In a media-driven society where people and organizations are constantly under a spotlight, hiding errors and failures is almost impossible.

But even if it were possible, why deny our most vulnerable, human, true sides?

When Alan Mulally became CEO of Ford, he held his first staff meeting asking everyone to rate their activities with a green, yellow, or red light.

Everyone responded with green; Mulally then asked them to come back the following week with more honest evaluations.

The first person to admit a red was praised.

He broke the ice and laid the foundation for a no-blame company culture, where difficulties are recognized and tackled together, and mistakes and failures are not stigmatized to avoid making people fearful, conservative, and less innovative.

When clumsiness pays off: the Pratfall Effect

Back in 1966, Harvard psychologists Elliot Aronson, Ben Willerman, and Joanne Floyd discovered something odd.

In an experiment, an actor (properly trained) was asked to answer a series of quiz questions correctly 92% of the time.

At the end of the test, the actor pretended to spill a cup of coffee on himself.

The performance was shown to a large sample of students divided into two groups: one group saw the entire performance, including the coffee spill; the other group saw the performance without the spill.

When asked how likable the actor was, the first group gave more favorable responses.

That spilled coffee made the actor seem more approachable, relatable, human. One of us.

The opposite happened, though, when the actor was trained to answer only 30% of the questions correctly – and was perceived as incompetent.

In this second setting, the gaffe worsened rather than improved the students' evaluations.

A clumsy mistake, therefore, enhanced the actor's image, but only if he was deemed competent.

A long history of brands admitting their flaws

Recognizing mistakes, flaws, and imperfections, maybe with a pinch of irony, isn’t new for brands.

Many will remember the Doyle Dane Bernbach campaign for Volkswagen (the best of the 20th century, according to Ad Age), which candidly admitted to being ugly (It’s ugly but it gets you there)...

...and slow (A VW won’t go over 72 mph. Even though the speedometer shows a wildly optimistic top speed of 90):

Stella Artois tackled the tough task of justifying a high price. If the product is expensive, it's because there's mastery, experience, and a long, complex process behind it. The tagline, not coincidentally, was Reassuringly Expensive:

Another famous beer, Guinness, acknowledged being slow to pour, but after all, good things come to those who wait:

Similarly, Heinz with its ketchup. Also slow to pour, but because it's thick and flavorful:

These campaigns adopted a typical reframing strategy: the flaw is acknowledged but placed in a different frame, highlighting its positive side.

So, costliness and slowness become synonymous with value and quality.

In other cases, when a difficulty arises, the remedy is simple: apologize with humility and humour.

That's what KFC did in 2018 when most of its UK restaurants ran out of chicken due to supply issues:

Finally, Airbnb, which in 2015 addressed the problem of racial discrimination on its platform through a heartfelt email from CEO Brian Chesky to the community:

On one hand, the company apologized for the delay and explained the initiatives taken on the matter; on the other, it didn't go easy on the community members, who had to follow the new nondiscrimination policy.

The poor credibility of a cloudless sky

Hiding negativity, therefore, doesn't seem like a good idea.

For reasons of honesty, transparency, and credibility.

A 2015 study by the Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University analyzed 111,460 reviews in 22 product categories, finding that the highest purchase likelihood didn’t coincide with totally positive reviews (with an average of 5 stars), but with largely positive reviews (with an average between 4.2 and 4.5 stars).

Simple: an all rosy scenario is too good to be true.

It's more plausible when a few off notes emerge between the lines: but without overdoing it, of course.