What Can Legal Marketers Learn from the Pet Food Problem?

Looking outside of the legal industry for business and marketing lessons is an important part of being a business owner. As a lawyer, you are a business owner. And you’re the owner of your own reputation.

One of the newsletters I receive, Denny Hatch’s Business Common Sense, recently contained an article about your business reputation. The article discussed the recent pet food recall and the failure of the CEO of the manufacturing company to immediately advise everyone in the food distribution chain of problems with the food.

While the article makes many interesting and important points about business and branding, part of the article included a copy of the ‘letter’ written by Proctor and Gamble to its customers and posted as an advertisement in several newspapers across the country following the recall of the contaminated food.

I’ve written about the importance of apologies in the past. This is yet another example. As a pet owner, how would you feel about this ‘apology?’ Would it be enough for you to continue to do business with the company?

Hatch’s article points out these problems:

• The letter doesn’t feel like a letter from one individual to another;
• The letter was filled with ‘we’ and ‘us’ rather than ‘I’ and ‘me’ (i.e. there was no individual taking responsibility for the problem);
• And finally, “Instead of a warm, sympathetic, deeply personal and moving piece of correspondence to a distraught and angry pet owner from a concerned and contrite CEO who had the balls to make himself known and take responsibility, it was a group letter signed by:The Employees of Iams and Eukanuba Pet Foods“

Will your law firm ever encounter a disaster of the scale of the pet food problem? Probably not. But at one point or another, you may encounter difficulty with a client or group of clients. What will you do? How will you save your reputation? Does this kind of apology do the trick?