Fishburn Hedges

23.01.2012

The past week has seen all three party leaders making waves about the need to reform capitalism.  Ed Miliband led from the front this time, with his conference speech on ‘reforming capitalism’ way back in September, followed by comments last week on ‘predatory capitalism’.  Nick Clegg weighed in with a speech about ‘fairer capitalism’ and a call for more of a ‘John Lewis economy’.  Finally, they were both joined by David Cameron who discussed ‘responsible capitalism’.  Private companies may well be thinking they need to tread carefully due to this high profile spotlight on how businesses run themselves.  From a communications perspective, if companies want to avoid bad headlines, the answer is very simple.  If something goes wrong, come clean and put it right straight away.  A couple of recent stories in the media have shown how true this is. 

The PIP breast implant story broke just before Christmas, and the French Government almost immediately agreed to pay for the removal of the implants because of the risk of cancer.  In the UK, the Government originally said they wouldn’t pay, but then agreed to remove the implants of women who have had reconstructive surgery after breast cancer on the NHS (approximately 4,000 women have implants once they’ve recovered from serious breast cancer treatment).  The remaining 36,000 women, however, now face paying for the removal operation themselves.  The Government urged the private sector surgeons to look after their customers in the same way, but they failed to take this advice.  The story has been generating headlines ever since, in particular, The Sunday Telegraph, who referred to plastic surgeons as ‘cowboys’ last weekend.  Media coverage tends to peak when the customer is given a particularly bad deal, and the calls only this morning to stop advertising for cosmetic surgery (particularly breast implants) suggest this story still has a way to go.

But not all companies or professionals behave in this way.  Last week you could be forgiven for missing the story that 30,000 Mini cars were being recalled because a fire linked to a faulty water pump had occurred.  The story, which broke early last Monday evening (16 January) received a ‘breaking news’ band running across the bottom of the screen on the BBC News channel.  But by the next day, the story was dead – it got no coverage in print editions of The Times, The Guardian, or The Daily Telegraph.  Editors obviously decided that this wasn’t a story worth covering because although there was a problem, the company acted immediately to correct it, at no cost to the consumer.  For Mini, this was simply a puncture, not a car crash.

So the communications message to those who have been made nervous by the political interest in reforming capitalism is simple.  If things go wrong, own up and make it right.  It is unlikely that sales of the Mini will be adversely affected, but I wonder how many breast implant operations will be performed this year compared to last.  My guess from this kind of coverage is that the number of operations (for cosmetic reasons) will fall dramatically - customer faith has been dented.  The surgeons’ inability to react to their ‘puncture’ has meant they have a serious car crash on their hands.  This is the type of capitalism that should be reformed.

If you’ve got a good customer service ethos and handling in place, however, you shouldn’t have so much to worry about.

Posted by Natasha Jones