Carrot Communications

Brands can never be completely sure of avoiding crisis situations. There are too many variables. Human error, fallibility, corruption, ambition and rivalries can cause considerable damage to a brand’s reputation and sometimes no amount of procedure can prevent this from happening. But the brand can control its response to the evolving situation. It can make [...]

You would think that common sense and decency would kick in here and that no brand would even dream of using a national disaster or traumatic event of any kind to promote its product – especially if said product was completely useless when it comes to responding to the problem at hand. However, you would [...]

Once a brand has made a very public error of judgement there’s no way back. It happened, people noticed. The brand has to understand why people were offended, apologise, learn from the mistake and move on. As we saw in January, some brands resort to denial (by, for example, deleting all critical comments from their [...]

  A customer comes into your flagship store, walks up to a member of staff and says that they’re having a problem with their latest purchase. It’s faulty and they want a refund. Does the employee: a.    Acknowledge that they are unhappy with the product, apologise, and help solve the problem b.    Pretend they didn’t [...]

John Lewis has upset a few people, it seems. The final scene of its Christmas ad shows a dog left out in the snow, while a small boy pins a Christmas stocking to its kennel. To say this hasn’t gone down well with dog lovers and animal welfare campaigners would be understating the case. Dogcast [...]