Sorry Not Sorry - The Truth About Apologies with Sean O’Meara
We’re sorry about this episode.. or rather.. this episode is about BEING sorry. When should you say sorry and when should you stand your ground? What makes an apology meaningful? We uncover the truth about apologies with our guest Sean O’Meara.
Sean O’Meara is the founder and Managing Director of Essential Content, a specialist content, and PR agency. He is also the co-author of The Apology Impulse: How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Saying It. He has worked with organizations including the BBC, Trello, Co-op Bank, and many more!
Why do we live in such a culture of apology?
Social media has given consumers access to brands, which has created a lot more accountability for brands.
Most of the time, nothing bad happens if you don’t say sorry.
How to deal with criticism
Ask yourself seriously if you’re at fault
If you aren’t at fault:
Explain the situation
Offer sympathy
If you are sorry:
Decide how sorry you are.
Decide what you’re going to do about it.
The best apologies have the crucial ingredient of action or change going forward.
An apology without action is useless.
Contrition exists on a scale - you can be varying degrees of sorry.
The more you over apologize, the more you devalue the concept of being sorry.
The word sorry has been cheapened and devalued in today’s world.
You can outsource your apology in Japan.
The “spotlight” effect and how criticism can create a dynamic of feeling like there is much more under the surface.
The Power of NOT saying sorry all the time.
“Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd”
There’s often lots of people sitting silently that think “don’t apologize!”
“Alienation marketing”
How do we decide when we should say sorry and when we shouldn’t?
Sometimes it’s best to wait before apologizing, instead of jumping the gun
How you can mess up your apologies
Using the passive voice messes up your apologies. “Mistakes were made” instead of “we made a mistake.”
“Schrodinger’s Apology”
What can we learn from the Tylenol poisoning crisis?
If you focus on actually fixing it, instead of protecting your reputation, your reputation stays protected.
Homework: Have a crisis management plan before you need one. What to do when you fail, and what to do when people think you’ve failed but you haven’t.
What are you accountable for?
Thank you so much for listening!
Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).
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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research
General
Media
GritDaily - “How Brands Ruined “Sorry” in 2019” by Sean O'Meara
City A.M. - “Sorry not sorry: End the apology culture in business” by Sean O’Meara
Kogan Page - How Your Company Shouldn’t Apologize
Home Business Mag - “Office Missteps? Three Steps to Saying Sorry at Work” By Sean O’Meara
Recruiter - “The Apology Response Plan: 3 Questions to Ask Before Responding to Criticism of Your Company” by Sean O’Meara
Fast Company - “How to address an issue without saying ‘I’m sorry’” By Stephanie Vozza
Open Business Council - “Viral News, Outrage Culture and ‘Fauxpologies’: The Book That Shows How Business Has Ruined ‘Sorry’” By OpenbusinessCouncil
MyCustomer - “‘Outrage capitalism’ and the unexpected benefits of not saying sorry to customers” by Sean O’Meara
Vox - “Why are brands so bad at apologizing?” By Terry Nguyen
Trello - “Fight Or Flight? How To Channel Your Work Anxiety In A Productive Way” by Sean O’Meara
“Is Your Quirky Job Title Damaging Your Productivity?” by Sean O’Meara
“Why Slacking Off Can Speed Up Your Productivity” by Sean O’Meara
The Telegraph - “Sorry seems to be the easiest word: Justin Trudeau, and the art of the political apology” by Sean O’Meara
[Podcast] The Entrepreneur Way - 1444: Having the Right Idea at the Right time with Sean O’Meara Founder and Owner of Essential Content Ltd
[Podcast] Business Innovators Radio Network - Mike Saunders Interviews Sean O’Meara Co-Author of The Apology Impulse – How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Saying It.
Videos
Kogan Page - How Your Company Shouldn’t Apologize | Sean O'Meara
Books
The Apology Impulse: How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Saying It by Cary Cooper and Sean O'Meara
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.
[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.
This episode is about saying you're sorry. When should you say sorry and when should you stand your ground? What truly makes an apology meaningful? We uncover all of this and the truth about apologies with our guest, Sean O'Meara.
Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.
In our previous episode, we had two guests discuss the light side and the dark side of influence. If you want to use Jedi mind tricks to influence others, listen to our previous episode.
Now for our interview with Sean.
[0:01:37.5] MB: Sean O'Meara is the Founder and Managing Director of Essential Content, a specialist content and PR agency. He's also the co-author of Apology Impulse. How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can't Stop Saying It. He has worked with organizations including the BBC, Trello, Co-op Bank and many more. Sean, welcome to the Science of Success.
[0:01:58.2] SO: Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me on.
[0:02:00.1] MB: Well, we're excited to have you on here today. I'd love to start with a bigger question, which is really in many ways we almost live today in a culture of apology. Your book really strikes at that in many ways. I'm curious, how did you pick this topic to really delve into and why do you think that culture has really emerged in our society?
[0:02:27.0] SO: I think there are two main reasons why we're now seeing and hearing a lot more apologies. They're both social trends or social movements. The first kind of accelerant of the public apology frequency that we're getting now in our news is to do with social media. Social media is giving consumers two really important things, given them access to brands, whereas before social media if you wanted to raise an issue with a brand, it took a little bit of effort. You would have to write a letter, or ring the head office. Now you can literally do it via your phone in a few taps.
We've got greater accessibility to brands. That has given the consumer much more accountability. The brands now, they figured out over the past few years that they have to answer to consumers. What's actually happened I think has been a little bit of an overcorrection. Social media was good, because it did provide accountability. The pendulum has swung a little bit too far the other way and now brands, instead of providing reasonable accountability and ensuring that consumers are mistreated, what we see is brands groveling and apologizing when really, they don't owe anybody an apology.
The reason myself and Professor Cary Cooper wrote this book was because we've worked together on articles in the past. I'm a publicist by trade, so my whole career is based around protecting reputations. Something happened a couple of years ago that with a client of mine that really changed my thinking on the concept of the corporate apology. I went over and spoke to carry about it. What happened was this client family-run business in logistics sector and they offered relocation services, shipping, storage, removals.
They'd received a complaint from a customer who'd said, he tried to ship some tools from London to New Zealand. The tools got held up in customs. Now he'd flown over. He'd got a – he was a very specialized engineer, he'd gone over for a job. He couldn't get his tools. They weren't easily accessible on the retail market. He couldn't just go and buy some replacements, so he was stuck.
It turns out, I spoke to my client and my first piece of advice was well, we need to apologize. He said, “Well, I don't want to apologize, because we as policy, we advise all client to ensure that their customs paperwork is correct and we give them as much help as possible. Now we spoke to this customer a couple of times to warn them that their customs declarations weren't quite right and it's something that the customer has to do for themselves.” Long story short, the client had said, “If I apologize, I'm effectively accepting blame for something that A, wasn't my fault and B, was something that I warned the customer about.”
Against my better judgment at the time I said, “Okay,” because the client really didn't want to apologize. I said, “What do we do if we're not going to apologize?” He said, “Well, why don't we explain?” We responded to the customer, because they escalated their grievance from angry e-mails to Twitter. The client’s reputation was beginning to suffer, the longer we didn't say anything. I was overruled as a publicist and the client said – here’s what I want to say. I don't want to say it unsympathetic, but I also don't want to appear that my company has done anything wrong.
We responded to the client and we said – we deliberately didn't say sorry and we said, “We appreciate that this is highly convenient for you, although we did really try to press on you the importance of this paperwork. Because you didn't complete this paperwork that you now don't have access to your tools.” Then I sat back and I braced myself for a barrage of hate. This was in the public arena. People were able to see these tweets. This guy was – he was tagging other people in. I was very prepared for it to go south from there.
What surprised me and made me change my thinking on not just apologizing, but on reputation management in general was sometimes, in fact most of the time, nothing bad happens if you don't say sorry. That then – it tuned me in to other apologies. I started looking at other brands. Every day, there would be a brand saying sorry for something that I thought – we don't mean that. There is no way on earth you are actually sorry. This is a quite clear public relations exercise.
I then rewrote my own guidance to my clients on how to deal with criticism, because that is where the corporate apology comes from. It may have escaped me, but I've never witnessed an apology that just came out of the blue that could have been concealed. Brands only apologized when their conduct is known. The consumer has become the brand's conscience.
What I started to do was advise my clients to follow a step-by-step process to deal with criticism. The first step is ask yourself sincerely, are you at fault? Are you actually sorry? Then if the answer is no, follow these steps. They involve explaining the situation, offering to help and showing sympathy and crucially not saying sorry. If on the other hand the client is at fault and they do owe somebody an apology, there is there is a step-by-step process of doing that. The first step is decide how sorry you are. A point we try to make really, really clearly in the book is that contrition exists on a spectrum.
There is a huge difference between “Sorry, your delivery was late,” versus “Sorry, there was a fault in this car that caused it crashing and sustained injury.” The more you over-apologize, the more you devalue the actual concept of being sorry. You see brands are always extremely sorry. They can't help themselves by dialing up the intensity on their apology. The first step is are we sorry? Yes, or no. The second step is how sorry. The third step is what we’re going to do about it. Because an apology isn't worth anything if it's just words. There needs to be action. You need to communicate to a customer, or an audience. “We acknowledge that we failed and here's what we're going to do to put it right.” The best apologies always have that crucial ingredient of this is what you can expect from us going forward.
A really nice example of that was JetBlue in I think 2004. They'd had a huge operational failure and lots of people were stranded in airports that they didn't want to be stranded in. Thousands of customers were upset. Not only were these customers in the wrong place, there were other customers watching how JetBlue handled it.
Their CEO David Neeleman made what I would describe as the first social media apology. He made a YouTube video apologizing and also saying, “This will never happen again, because we are doing this and here's what you can expect from us.” They actually wrote a customer Bill of Rights, published it on their website and it's been on their website ever since.
The thinking behind the book was we as publicists and business communicators are going to – we're going to really wear out the value of the word ‘sorry’ if we keep going the way we're going. Customer trust is going to just tank and we aren't going to have any effective tools for crisis management for handling criticism and for building trust. I wanted to along with Cary, my co-author, write a book that could effectively rescue ‘sorry’ from obscurity before the customer, consumer trust in the word disappeared completely.
[0:11:24.4] MB: That's a great insight. Do you feel in today's world that ‘sorry’ has been already cheapened and devalued in some ways?
[0:11:36.4] SO: I do. In both contexts, I think in interpersonal relationships, especially in in certain cultures. I'm from the UK and we're famous for using ‘sorry’ as a social lubricant. I've noticed this for years and I now – I work really hard not to say sorry when I mean something else. A couple years ago, I was standing on a train platform early in the morning. There was me and there was one other guy on the platform. He came over and the first word out of his mouth was, “Sorry.” Then he said, “Sorry, do you know if this train goes to the airport?”
Now that's really common here. ‘Sorry’ is the icebreaker. Obviously, the guy had nothing to apologize for really, other than breaking the social convention of interrupting me from staring at my phone, or whatever else I would do. The train did go to the airport so I said, “Yeah, the next train goes to the airport,” and we both got on with our lives. I spent the rest of the day paying attention to how many times people apologize.
People in the UK are weirdly proud of this quirky awkwardness, where they say sorry when they don't mean it. I don't think we deserve to be proud of that. I spend quite a lot of time in Spain where my parents live. People in Spain don't think it's cute and people in America – a friend of mine lives in Dallas. I remember noting the difference. I was over there for is wedding. I was there for a good couple of weeks. Americans seem to have a lot more vocabulary for those little moments, those little, “Excuse me. Do you mind? Can I interrupt you for one second?” Kind of interactions. Whereas in the UK, it's always ‘sorry’. You'd be amazed at how many people start a conversation with the word ‘sorry’ and then go on to talk about something that isn't an apology.
That said the UK are the worst in terms of apologizing. From the research we've done in the book, we are the sorriest culture. I think Japan has a very unique and interesting relationship with contrition. You can actually outsource your apology in Japan. There are apology agencies, which will go and apologize for you and looking into why that is. Cary, the co-author, reserved, renowned psychologist, he had some insights on this anyway. A lot of it is to do with population density. If big cities in Japan are crowded, people are on the subway. There's a lot of small micro-interactions.
The other thing is on a culture. Some cultures are a little bit more relaxed about minor social transgressions. Different countries in Europe are very different about how they deal with for example, getting in somebody's way on the streets, or holding a door versus not holding a door. Other cultures are very, very fixated and they really value those very small gestures.
I think a lot of work has already been done to devalue the apology. I think everybody is guilty of it to a degree. I'm sure and I've done it. I'm sure you've done it. You've apologized when you weren't sorry, just to placate somebody who was upset.
We have devalued it. We are in danger of – it's a little bit like a currency. The more of currency that you issue, the lower the value becomes, just because you're dealing in scarcity versus abundance. If something is available everywhere, people don't value it. If something is rare, it's a little bit more special. In terms of that's my original point of the two ways we've done it. As individuals, we do it all the time, we over apologize and we apologize when we don't need to. Corporations have really taken that theme and run with it, and it's become especially true in the past few years, not just because of social media, but because of what's – I mean, I don't like the term, but I guess the closest thing to it would be call-out culture.
What we've noticed is before social media, a brand was – they had a few responsibilities and they all related to your rights as a consumer. You would expect to be charged the right amount of money, you would expect to receive a certain level of service, you would expect your product not to be faulty. If those things didn't happen, you could expect an apology.
Nowadays and it's a combination of clickbait, the desire to find, to see outrage wherever it is; social media amplifying that. Brands are now accountable for consumers’ feelings, which is really dangerous because rights are absolute. You know what your consumer rights are and you know as an organization which rights you have to respect. With feelings, it's different for every consumer. What we notice with these high-profile corporate apologies is more often than not, they're to do with feelings, rather than rights.
Thinking back to a couple of years ago, it was Dove, cosmetics brand. They had to apologize for a advertising campaign that they launched. Now what happened is they've got a range of different models in the advert, they had black models, Asian, white. It was very diverse cast of models. The general gist of the advert is model A takes off her sweater. As she's taking it off, model B appears.
It's a little bit like the Michael Jackson video for black or white, where the edit switches. As the sweater goes over the head, the head that comes out is the next model, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that, but there was a clip that circulated that was edited misleadingly, which made it look like a black model had used Dove so and then became a white model. The implication being that it was a throwback to the really old offensive soap adverts that did actually use before-and-after models in a racist way.
Now Dove is a huge brand. They spend more than – Procter & Gamble I think it is who owned them, spend more than anyone else in the world in advertising. They're not stupid. They're not going to decide one day, “Hey, let's go and trash our reputation and create a racist advert.” They're not going to do that. But because of the fact that consumers were able to interpret it wrongly and often deliberately wrongly, that was enough for Dove to A, feel that they owed an apology to their consumers and B, to withdraw the entire campaign.
Now that is hugely costly, because not only do they have to – they'll have already paid for the advertising space, the airtime. They're going to pay for that again when they put out the new advert, they're going to have to create a new advert, they’re going to have to focus group it. They're then going to have to be really, really careful, hyper vigilant about the reaction to the next advert.
What they could have done is say, “This clip that you're seeing doesn't represent the advert. It's been edited in a certain way. This isn't the message of the advert. We would never create an advert that was even close to suggesting what people think it's suggesting. Here's the real thing.” They would have gotten some friction from that. There would have been push back. What they were apologizing for really when you cut the fat from the messaging was, “Wait. We're sorry that you were able to misinterpret our advert. We didn't got in enough effort to make it so pure and so squeaky clean that there was no possible misinterpretation.”
That happens an awful lot. Brands will – they’ll do something with the best intentions and consumers love looking for flaws in things. They will go, “Oh, hey. This could offend this demographic, or this is wrong because I'm offended personally me as one person.” Instead of the brand's being a little bit resilient and saying, “Well, it's not what we meant. This is what we meant,” and explaining the default response to criticism, especially around what we call in the book cultural criticism, is to put that fire out immediately with a big bucket of cold water and that cold water is the apology.
It never works, because it's like a signal. It's an invitation for more criticism. There is a pattern to this. The media play a really key part in amplifying these situations. They usually start off with one or two criticisms, then the media will report on those criticisms and nine times out of 10, they will approach the branding question. That brand then has a decision to make. They can either refuse to apologize and the headline is brand refuses to apologize for advert that offended consumers, or brand apologizes for offensive advert.
Either way, the media has their headline. I'm talking about the viral news media here, who are not necessarily in the business of reporting hard facts and verifying things and asking questions. Just three tweets is enough for it to be reported as an outrage. The media will do that, because they know people will click on those headlines and they know people will click on those headlines whether they agree or disagree with what the brand did and whether they agree or disagree with the fact that the brand apologized.
[0:22:14.5] MB: Yeah, it's a very fraught dynamic in many ways.
[0:22:18.2] SO: It is. I feel sorry for my fellow publicists, because they have a set of tools at their disposal. I guess when everything looks like a crisis, the tool you're going to reach for is an apology. That’s to do with a spotlight effect of the bias of well, 20 people are shouting at me on the Internet. Therefore, there must be 20 million people reading this. There's been studies into this about criticism creating a perception of greater attention.
When people receive criticism, they think it's reaching a bigger audience than when they receive praise. I can totally relate to the social media manager who is looking after a brand account. They get that tweet that says – usually it's something, let's say, I don't know, Pepsi. The tweet will be something like, “Really Pepsi? You thought this was okay?” Then it will tag in a few slightly higher profile Twitter accounts. It only takes one of those other Twitter accounts to respond and go, “Oh, my God. I can't believe Pepsi thought this was okay.” An advert and it actually did happen to Pepsi with the Kendall Jenner advert a couple years ago, which they apologized for.
There's a value chain. It will be a consumer that spots something that they don't like, they will then usually tweet or make a YouTube video about it. Then what they're doing is they're – nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. The minute they get a blue tick verified Twitter account to join in, that brand is then in trouble. What I'm urging brands to do is take a leaf out of Protein World's book. Protein World is a UK-based supplement brand. They had an advert. I can't remember the year. I think it was 2017 on the London underground network. It’s a swimwear model, very fit, athletic-looking model in a bikini. The slogan was “Are you beach body ready?” It was an advert for getting fit; was a weight loss product. Makes sense that they would use a athletic model.
People didn't like the advert. They were defacing them. There were protest marches. There were all sorts of hashtags. It looked just – it was the perfect storm and everybody was expecting Protein World to say, “We're sorry. We didn't mean to offend. We've misjudged. We're going to withdraw the advert.” What they did was the opposite of that. They doubled down and said, “Well, if you're offended by people who are healthy, then that's your problem.”
The reason that I encourage people to just, I'm not saying behave like Protein World, because they are deliberately provocative. Just go and look at how they handled that crisis. They took the time to think, “Are we culpable in any way here?” Then when they were sure of themselves that, “No, we haven't done anything wrong. There is nothing wrong with an athletic swimwear, a model advertising our product.” They used the negative energy that was coming towards them as a positive and what they knew that a lot of brands didn't know is that for every voice criticizing them, there were 10 people silently sitting there going, “I hope they don't apologize actually, because this is ridiculous.” In the book we called that alienation marketing.
If you're the person that buys a protein supplement, you're probably the person that goes to the gym. If you go to the gym and you're invested in that enough to buy a supplement, you're probably in good shape, or you want to be in good shape, so you're not going to be offended by the idea that a sports/swimwear model is advertising a product. You're probably going to be more offended by the idea that she shouldn't be advertising that product.
Protein World, they've got a whole chapter in the book dedicated to how they handled it, because not only did they not apologize, they turned that “crisis” into a huge marketing win. I think – I'm just trying to recall the figures. Their head of marketing said that they did – it took them four days to do a million extra pounds in sales, because of the free publicity that the outrage was causing.
While everybody was saying, “Oh, they should sack their PR guy. They should throw their marketing strategy in the bin,” they were actually just sitting back, letting that the cash registers ring and watching the money flow in. It was because they knew who their customer was. There is a benefit to not saying sorry and there are a 101 downsides to saying sorry when you shouldn't.
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[0:28:56.6] MB: For both businesses and also individuals and these may be different answers, but how should we think about when to say sorry and when to stand our ground?
[0:29:06.5] SO: The timing of it is actually really interesting. In terms of when to say sorry, my personal philosophy on that is say sorry A, if you've done something wrong and B, you are actually sorry. If you apologize for anything, you're eventually going to lose trust. If it's a relationship, let's say it’s your spouse, or one of your parents, if one of you is always saying sorry, at some point the mask is going to slip and people are going to realize, “They're not really sorry. They're just saying it.”
In terms of how I advise my clients when to say sorry, if you failed in a meaningful way, then you should say sorry, but you don't have to do it immediately. You are allowed to think about it. There's a study and the title is Better Late than Early. I would encourage people to go and look at this study. It's about the timing of apologies. The title of our book The Apology Impulse refers to impulsive apologies. You hear a criticism, you say sorry.
The science suggests that actually when you do owe an apology, if you leave it, if there is a gap between your transgression and your apology, the recipient of the apology feels better about the situation. Instant reflexive apologies are perceived as insincere. There is a sweet spot. If you leave it too long, the person that you owe the apology to will think that you've forgotten about it. If you do it too soon, it will look impulsive.
There's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle that suggests that you've engaged in a period of self-examination. You've actually put some thought into it. I used the hypothetical example of Donald Trump. If he called a press conference tomorrow and said, “I've been thinking about 2016 and how I spoke about Hillary Clinton. I think I owe Hillary an apology.” People's heads would explode. Not only because it's Donald Trump and he's not known for self-examination and saying sorry, but also because that would be a really sincere apology, because what's he got to gain from it now? Nothing.
If he'd apologized at the time when people are saying, “You should apologize to Hillary,” the second the word ‘sorry’ left his mouth, people would have rejected it. If he did it now, there's something in that. There is value in taking away what you've done and thinking about it. Some of the best corporate apologies have come after a period of it could be a few months.
Mitsubishi apologized. I think it was for something – Mitsubishi used prisoner of war labor in World War II and never said sorry for it. Then obviously, they've had dozens of CEOs since that happened. I think it was 2015, around that time, they decided that they did those people an apology. Now suddenly, a lot of those people had died, so they actually struggled to find somebody to accept the apology.
The person they found, he was in a difficult situation, because he was not only being asked to accept an apology to him, but he was being asked to accept an apology on behalf of people who weren't around to accept, or reject the apology. He said that Mitsubishi wanted to fly him over. I think he was based in San Francisco. They wanted to apologize personally and they're willing to pay for his transport and they were going to show him what they were doing to make it right. I felt sorry for that guy as well, because he had a lot of pressure on him to say to Mitsubishi, “It’s okay. We, the people who you're now trying to apologize to, forgive you.” He couldn't speak for everybody.
The interesting thing about that apology was it took forever. It was the same with the makers of Thalidomide. It’s a morning sickness drug that caused deformities in babies. They took, I think it was 50 years. I think they actually picked the 50-year anniversary of the scandal coming out to actually issue a proper apology.
Now there’s two ways of looking at that. You could look at it and go, “It's good they apologized and they should have come sooner.” Or you could say, “Well, at least they’ve put some thought into this.” This isn't a public relations exercise, because the makers of that drug have been making drugs – for the past 50 years, the scandal didn't affect them massively. They were they were still making drugs, still making lots of money, so they couldn't be accused of, “Oh, you're only apologizing now because customers are leaving you.” That wasn't what it was about. It’s a genuine attempt to put things right.
In terms of timing, it is really interesting. In terms of how to get there, there's a lot of work that should go on behind the scenes. Like I said earlier, the apology is only part of it. You need a path to recovery and you need to regain trust as well. It's what you do once you've said sorry, or what you say you're going to do that matters, as much as how you say sorry. How you say sorry can – it can be the difference between another PR exercise that people forget, or actually damages your reputation. Or it can be the start of improving your reputation.
Some brands have actually improved perceptions of themselves by how they apologized. There are lots of ways you can mess up your apology and we explore these in the book. One example that really, really gets – really annoys me is using the passive voice. You've been criticized and you want to address it. It's really tempting for communicators, professional communicators to say things like, “Mistakes were made, products were faulty.” Instead of saying, “We made a mistake, or our products were faulty.” It's a very subtle, but very manipulative use of language, kind of sneaky, where by using that passive voice, you're putting a little bit of distance between you, the agent of failure and the act, the thing that went wrong. Passive voice is always a red flag for an insincere apology.
Another huge red flag is what we call in the book Schrodinger's apology, where the apologizer will give themselves a character reference before they get to the apology. Now a little thought experiment; if you get an e-mail tomorrow and it's from your bank and you're just scanning it and you see the words, “We take the protection of your data very seriously,” you could put money on the fact that there is a ‘but’ coming and it's about to tell you, “But we advise that you change your password, or you check your recent transactions.”
These statements, these self-elevating pats on the back that companies gives them, give themselves, they always cloud the meaning of an apology. It's one of the most common ways an apology can fail. There was a case a few years ago in Toronto and it was a drug testing facility. They were contracted by local government to conduct drug tests on parents who'd had their children taken away.
Part of the process of being reunited with their children was to test negatively for certain drugs over a certain period of time. The problem was these tests were not accurate and there were a number of and it was pretty much all mothers, who'd had their children removed on the basis of these tests. Then it was later found that those tests were inaccurate. This was a huge, huge scandal. These mothers had done what they were supposed to do, they'd got help with their addictions and these tests failed them. They'd lost their children on the basis of this company producing inaccurate drug testing results.
When the court case is over and the CEO of that company had to apologize, the first words out of his mouth were, “We take the –” Something like, we – Ah, this was it. “We have the highest standards of da, da, da, da, da.” You don't get to say that when you're addressing your own failure, but so many brands will do that. They can't help. Just throwing in a little character reference for themselves, because they think it makes apology easier to swallow.
Actually, it really annoys consumers because they're not stupid. They can see through it. In fact, it's almost Pavlovian in that when you hear a company talking about “We have high standards of, or we care deeply about this,” you almost sense that they're about to tell you, “But we failed and we're sorry.” These corporate indulgences where the communicator, whether that's the CEO, whether that's the director of marketing, or whoever they are, the person in charge of communicating that message, there's a box of tricks that they'll go through and they’ll go, “Right. We've got to say sorry. How do we wriggle out of it? How do we make ourselves look good while saying sorry?”
If I'm advising these companies and I do tell all my clients this, is don't because consumers aren't stupid. You're just going to make your reputation suffer more than it is already. Just say sorry. Just lead with sorry. Explain why you failed, how you failed and how you're going to put it right. Don't say any more than that.
[0:39:26.8] MB: Yeah, that's a really good point. Just instead of hedging and qualifying an authentic apology is going to be a lot more impactful.
[0:39:35.7] SO: It is.
[0:39:36.4] MB: You said something earlier too that really bears repeating and it is quite important, which is that a part of a genuine apology, maybe one of the cornerstones of it is action. Grounding it into some action that you're actually going to take to really move the needle, or rectify the situation.
[0:39:55.1] SO: Yeah. I think the best example of this was the Tylenol poisoning crisis. Now we’re going back a few decades here. That is probably the case study in how to handle a crisis. The interesting thing about that, because it's often referred to as the best corporate apology there ever was. The really interesting thing is that James Burke, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson never said the word ‘sorry’. That's because he didn't need to. He was busy doing other things.
When you're trying to get your little packet of medication open and you go in through what seems like endless layers of protection, so there's this foil, there’s all that, that's because of the Tylenol poisoning crisis. Johnson & Johnson learned that they had a problem. Their product was being tampered with and people were dying and people were getting ill. They effectively switched off the public relations machine and said, “Right. All of our energy is going into fixing this.”
I mean, I think it was less than six months they'd created tamper-proof packaging. Now you don't need to hear the word ‘sorry’, if the company goes, “Right. You can now buy our product with confidence, because we've gone away and we've innovated and we fixed the problem.” I think if your focus is more on how do we fix it, rather than how do we protect our reputation, in a way where your reputation protects itself, if you're seen to be focused on the problem and protecting your consumers, then there will come a time when you can say, “Hey, we're sorry and here's what we've done to fix it, or here's what we're doing to fix it.”
If you're preoccupied with, “Okay, we're getting criticized. We need to put that fire out.” Your energy isn't on the problem. Your energy is on your own reputation. It's always been a case, but it's more – consumers really don't like that. It plays out differently depending on the industry you're in as well, because let's say there's a problem with Starbucks coffee beans. There's a batch that’s been – there's a bad batch, something like that, or even Starbucks have done an advert that is really distasteful. If you're a consumer, it's no real hardship for you to go, “Oh, well. I'm going to get my coffee from one of the hundred and one other takeaway coffee places within 20 minutes of where I work.” A Dunkin Donuts, or if you're in the UK, this Costa Nero. That is what is called a low-friction industry.
If I'm a consumer and I fall out with Starbucks, I've got choices. I can go elsewhere. If it's air travel is similar in that your airline annoys you enough, there are other airlines. If it's your bank, yes, there are other banks, or if it's your life insurance company. You do have options, but the friction to exercise that choice is so much higher. If your bank annoys you, you've got to close your account, you've got to find another account, you've got to redirect all of your payments you did. There will be mistakes, payments will get lost, you've got to tell everybody how to changed banks, here's my new bank details.
If you're a business, that is a huge operational undertaking. What you'll see in industries where it's more difficult for people to exercise their choice, with habit for apologizing is actually lower. That's because Starbucks know if we know enough people, they're going to move to one of our competitors. There is always somewhere else to buy a coffee and it's no hardship to walk an extra block past Starbucks down to the other guy that makes good coffee as well.
It happened with Uber a couple years ago. In the UK, Uber is the only game in town. If you want a ride-sharing service, there is no Lyft. Uber is the only company in the UK that does that. In the states, it’s just a little bit different. You've got Lyft in certain cities and probably nationwide now. When Uber fails, people can easily just dump Uber, which was the hashtag.
[0:44:31.2] MB: For listeners who want to concretely implement some of the things we've talked about today, what would be one action step, or a piece of homework that you would give them to begin implementing some of this into their lives?
[0:44:44.7] SO: The best thing that they can do is to have a plan before they need a plan. Have a crisis management strategy that includes what to do A, when you fail and B, when people think you failed, but you didn't fail. There is no worse time to try and come up with a crisis plan than when you were in crisis. If you are facing high volumes of criticism as a brand and you don't have a plan in place, you've already failed.
Now is the time to go in and write that plan and what are you accountable for, what are you not accountable for, what are your processes for recovering from failure and what are your processes for repairing damage with your customers and consumers.
[0:45:33.1] MB: Sean, where can listeners find you and the book and your work online?
[0:45:37.1] SO: I'm best found on Twitter. My handle is @SeanOmeara, which is S-E-A-N-O-M-E-A-R-A. The book is available in Barnes & Noble over there. It's also available if you're passing through an airport in WHSmith, which I believe have airport branches in America and also in Europe. They're probably the best places. My company website it is essentialcontent.co.uk and that’s my consultancy business and people can get in touch with me there and I'm happy to chat via e-mail about all things public relations and all things crisis.
[0:46:17.7] MB: Well Sean, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing these insights. It's very fascinating look at dealing with crisis.
[0:46:25.1] SO: Thanks, Matt. It was a pleasure.
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