The Apology Impulse summary

Out of all the items that come up on your news feed, how many are stories about corporate wrongdoing? These stories have become commonplace. But the truth is, customer complaints would begin and end on Twitter if it weren’t for the collusion of the media in promoting them as big news.

Viral news writers have worked out a sure-fire formula for getting people to read and share stories: appealing to their sense of outrage. The best way to do that is with narratives about innocent customers fighting against villainous corporations. That’s why writers are constantly on the lookout for juicy customer complaints. When they report on them, a tweet which may have been instantly buried on Twitter is suddenly given a lot of exposure, amplifying the story and putting even more pressure on the corporation to apologize. When they do, journalists are given yet another headline as they report on one more corporation making a “humiliating” apology.

On a cold winter day in 2018, hungry British families lined up at KFC for a serving of the company’s famous chicken, only to be told that the store had completely run out! More than half of UK branches had run out of the crucial ingredient, and had to summarily close their doors.

Customers were a little grumpy, but their intrinsic faith in the brand wasn’t shaken. In fact, when KFC ran an ad saying “FCK, we’re sorry,” customers laughed along and put the incident behind them. Everyone understands that logistics occasionally don’t go as planned.

The cast of La La Land had a few seconds of pure euphoria when they won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017. But euphoria turned to disbelief when it was revealed that they hadn’t won it at all; Moonlight was the true recipient. The organizers, PricewaterhouseCoopers, had bungled the envelopes with the winner’s names.

In a statement released the next day, PwC said, “We apologize…for the error that was made.” At first, it might sound like PwC was taking responsibility. But by using the passive voice, it was sneakily trying to squirm out of doing just that.

Imagine you fall in a hole that’s been left in the sidewalk by some construction workers, injuring your leg. When you complain, the building company responds by telling you how stressful and hard the situation is for them. Chances are, you’ll be even more upset by that response.

It might seem very obvious that an apology should focus on the people who have been hurt. But many corporations make the mistake of focusing on how the situation is affecting them, rather than the injured party.

In 2010, a young, hoodie-clad Mark Zuckerberg apologized to Facebook users for violating their privacy and vowed to do better. He had recently started Facebook, and people accepted that there were teething problems; they forgave the apparent lapse.

In 2018, Zuckerberg had to apologize again for breaches in data security, this time in the context of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Eight years after his first apology, his second didn’t hold much weight. It’s not enough to say you’ll change. You have to actually follow through.

You might think that when you complain about a company, you’re talking about an abstract, faceless entity. But really, behind any organization’s PR strategy there’s a team of real people, and they’re often quaking in their boots when on the receiving end of a negative social media campaign.

When you have thousands of angry tweets and Facebook posts accusing your company of the worst possible things and threatening a boycott, it can be easy to panic and try to do anything to appease them.