Following on from #amazonfail, we have Domino’s Pizza who also got into serious trouble over the Easter Weekend when two employees videod themselves doing quite horrible things in food preparation, and posted it on YouTube.
“Global Brands” live off a vision of perfection which can’t possibly stand up to the level of scrutiny that’s no longer possible when every bad thing that might happen is immediately exposed to the world. Quite often these brands are in people-centric service industries, which means they are widely-dispersed and with low-paid staff. You can’t possibly imagine nothing bad is ever going to happen – it always has, just now we hear about it, quickly – and form judgements before the Corporation can react.
I wonder how this is going to play out…
- Maybe we’ll all gain a maturity of understanding and perspective – nothing is perfect. That’s going to take a lot.
- Perhaps Brands will try to develop a level of paranoia and control which rivals the Drug Industry in terms of preserving the integrity of their product and operations. That will no doubt require a serious upgrade in the people who are in customer-facing positions. The people who get part time jobs in fast food joints are also the kind of people who’d think it was funny to mess around when the boss is out and post it on the Internet.
- Hopefully we’ll realise the truth behind the fast food brands and perhaps eat more healthily! Got to think that YouTube video will do more for healthy eating than a government educational campaign.
- It could be that global brands just collapse under the weight of unrealistic expectations (or pretensions). They claim to be perfect, but we’ll be faced with a continuous stream of believable evidence that they aren’t, which the brand will respond to with more corporate-speak, thus discrediting them more.
Interesting times indeed. We used to have Pizza delivered to the office quite regularly, but perhaps not any more! Should do our diets a lot of good….