Cadbury - It's ok to say you messed up

Business is filled with risk. Cadbury knows all about that to get to the global brand they are today. This week it was uncovered that they took a risk and lost.

Makes you worry though. If Cadbury, of all companies, knew their products contained salmonella and carried on selling it for five months thinking it was worth the risk, how many other companies do you think are taking the same attitude to the same risk?

I made a lengthy comment on Neville Hobson's post Cadbury product recall needs two-way dialogue further expressing my views on the Cadbury situation.

Product Frustration

Dave Pollard has recently posted about the use of customer anthropology where he discusses the idea of (business to business) product makers observing their customers at work.

One sentence struck me as I read it:

"If the customer knows you are observing them using their product, they're less likely to throw it across the room in frustration."

Software needs a physical representation for just such a purpose...

Advertising that you fire bad customers

Nobody likes a whiner. How far will you and/or your company go to test that theory?

Fire the customer is a strong concept that has received some backing this year. We are talking about the truly awful customers that kick up a real stink for something very little (which is often addressed and sorted by the company under the coshstick) and they are needlessly highly vocal about it.

Resources are thrown at the problem with ludicrous abandon just to hush them up.

So if we are universally agreed that this is wasteful when are we going to start seeing:

We don't deal with crappy customers. So we've got a lot more time for you...

?

Inspiration from:
Seth Godin's Do customers have responsibilities?
Heather Hamilton's Fire the customer and make it snappy

Congratulations to the Germans

No, not because they can beat Costa Rica (fantasies about winning the trophy are wild if you can't manage that), but because they are taking the British banter in good spirits.

Chants of "10 German bombers in the air" and "2 world wars and one world cup" could, and probably should, have gone down really badly.
But the Germans are laughing it up, letting the beered up foreigners get on with it and behaving admirably.