Own your mistakes and rebuild trust.
Have you ever been brought in to work on the messaging strategy for a service outage, major product issue, accidental email, or even something more serious, like a data breach? Maybe you’ve been on the receiving end? Nothing reeks more of BS than a company trying to pass the blame or tip-toe around it. Sometimes it takes an approach like this from KFC to maintain or regain customer trust. When their “#ChickenCrisis” became international news in 2018, here’s the ad they took out in UK newspapers. The copy reads: “We’re sorry. A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It’s not ideal. Huge apologies to our customers, especially those who travelled out of their way to find we were closed. And endless thanks to our KFC team members and our franchise partners for working tirelessly to improve the situation. It’s been a hell of a week, but we’re making progress, and every day more and more fresh chicken is being delivered to our restaurants. Thank you for bearing with us.” The lesson here? Just own the mistake and let customers know what you’re doing to fix it. I found this example in Dan Nelken's book, A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters. It's an awesome read with a ton of great as examples.
