News events have affected purchasing decisions
Bad news has a long shelf life. High-profile quality or safety failures can remain in the minds of consumers for decades. Recollection levels were high across the board – from food, manufacturing, and financial services, to failures in healthcare and medicines. 65% of respondents recalled ‘Mad Cow Disease’ (as the BSE outbreak was termed by the media), despite the peak outbreak being in the early 1990s, 62% were aware of salmonella in eggs in the 1980s, and PPI miss-selling in the early 2000s (57%). Of the top 10 most remembered, four related to food, two related to financial services, two to medicine or medical device failures and the remaining were manufacturing (automotive and fashion).
Which of these 'quality related' news events are you aware of?
Mad cow disease
Salmonella in eggs
PPI miss-selling
Horsemeat in food
2008 banking crisis
Thalidomide
Diesel emissions fixing
Fashion brands' sweatshop use
PIP breast implants
Pret and allergens
However, more concerning for organisations was the proportion of people who said that these things changed their behaviours, and not just for the affected product. A quarter of people who recalled the mad cow disease scare or salmonella in eggs said it changed their purchasing decisions, healthcare decisions and opinions.
Ideagen advice
The old adage “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is clearly not true. Reputational damage will hurt in the short term and can last for decades. Do everything you can to avoid it by investing in robust quality management systems and using technology to monitor processes and manage risk. Be prepared for a crisis. Hopefully that day won't come, but having a collaboration solution in place that enables you to react swiftly to a crisis and keep all stakeholders across your supply chain or ecosystem involved, will help protect your brand and hard-earned reputation. A solution like Ideagen Huddle will give you a collaborative and compliant place to store and share crisis management plans, policies, processes and potential pre-modelled response content. Similarly, Ideagen PleaseReview allows high volumes of stakeholders to come together and collaborate on developing policies procedures and incident response communications. With clear audit trails and the ability to review, edit and redact content throughout your ecosystem senior leaders will be able to approve appropriate response communications reducing the amount of time spent in coordinating an event response and instead investing the time in addressing it.