Image

Two different news stories hit the business section today that I think illustrate just how hard it is to maintain corporate image today, especially when you live in a country in which just about everyone seems to be offended by just about everything. I thought they made a nice contrast, in that they’re completely different problems that lead to similar headaches for management.

The first one regards the ongoing controversy over crime on cruise ships. There are hearings going on this week before Congress (here’s the USA Today story about them) concerning the growing problem of crime on cruise ships. People who have been victims of various crimes are demanding that our government pass laws that will force the cruise companies to prevent these crimes, a process complicated by the fact that most cruise ships operating from the United States are flagged under other countries’ flags in order to avoid various obscure US laws that would prevent them from operating. More to the point, most (if not all) of the crimes under discussion occurred when the ships were in International waters, where US law does not apply in the first place.

Now, I don’t want to understate the seriousness of these offenses, or downplay the rights of customers to enjoy safe vacation travel. Certainly, if you were robbed or assaulted on an airplane or a train you would demand that the government do something about it, no matter where the conveyance happened to be at the time of the incident. The point I am driving at here is that even if every one of the claims made by the victims’ rights groups are valid, there is still an instance of less than 0.01% over the whole of cruise ship passengers (as reported by the Los Angeles Times this date). Fewer than one passenger in 10,000 is reporting any crime. Not a very high instance, compared to the crime statistics from any major city, for example.

Yet there are hearings before Congress, headlines in the paper, stories on the Internet and on television news programs, web sites, advocate groups, and a lot more, all going on as if your chances of being robbed, raped or murdered onboard a cruise ship were extremely high – or at least better than 1 in 10,000, anyway. It emphasizes just how hard it is to maintain your image (or even your industry’s image) in a world where ANY event will be over the Internet in seconds, and before Congress a few days later. The fact that so few people trust corporate leadership any longer – that most readers and viewers will expect the cruise companies to downplay and underreport these incidents – just makes it that much worse.

Also in today’s paper is another article about the fallout from CKE’s latest television commercials, advertising the patty melt sandwich available at Carl’s Jr. and Hardees locations around the country. The commercials featured two young men performing a rap song about ”flat buns” in a high school classroom, while their teacher (a young woman) performed a suggestive and not entirely unobscene dance on top of her desk. These commercials were, of course, immediately flamed by teachers’ unions and parent groups all over the country, and eventually had to be edited to remove the “teacher” from them.

Keep in mind that there is nothing about this commercial that violates any state or Federal anti-obscenity laws; there’s nothing going on that can’t be shown on television, or that viewers of all ages can’t see somewhere else on TV. Keep in mind also that the primary target demographic for these ads is Males, 18-36, for whom the idea of an attractive young woman doing something suggestive is certainly not inappropriate, or at least, not unusual. The rap song itself bears a passing similarity to a song that received heavy rotation on rock and rap radio stations just a few years ago, and it should be noted that there was no outcry over the original whatsoever.

In this writer’s opinion you’d almost have to be a humorless idiot to take offense at a hamburger commercial in the first place, let alone one as harmless as this one. It’s quite obvious that the company did not intend to insult, demean or denigrate anyone, only to sell a few specialty sandwiches. No one could possibly consider this a policy statement by the company or a political or social statement intended to influence the viewers. Yet all over the country, people are reacting as if they are doing something criminal.

Of course, CKE brought this on themselves, while the various cruise companies are simply being plagued by opportunistic crimes, a problem that affects nearly all companies that deal with the public. Still, it does illustrate how difficult it is to build a good corporate image – and how little it takes to destroy one…