Moving Into Damage Control
What do you do when you find that one of your merchants - or a range of products that you might be selling online - starts getting a lot of bad press?
Do you temporarily pull your - or is that just a waste of time? Do you run away from the product or merchant and never touch them again? Do you do nothing and hope that it all goes away?
Over the weekend boat licences has become a rather hot topic here in the part of Australia where I live and that occurred just at the same time that one of our clients was starting to promote that aspect of their business. So I wrote to the company that our client is the local agent for and asked what they intended to do so that we didn’t step on their toes at a local level and got this reply.
I’ve been in this business for 13 years and seen similar incidents. President Bush arrives today for APEC, so by tonight everyone will have completely forgotten the accident.
Completely ignore it and go along as planned. Todays news is tomorrow’s chips paper
I think that there’s a lot of wisdom there and I think it certainly applies in this instance … but I don’t think it will apply to every instance that affiliates are going to face. Developing the skills to know which form of damage control should be applied when problems do arise is very important for affilaites and something that is really up to the individual.