Marketoonist: "Corporate Apology" cartoon

Weekly business cartoon from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne

Author

Tom Fishburne
July 29, 2024

Welcome to Marketoonist, my cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. I believe in the power of laughing at ourselves at work. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

Corporate Apology

The recent CrowdStrike debacle gives lessons for all of us in how to (and how not to) communicate in a crisis. The initial tweeted response from CEO George Kurtz fell flat, as panned by comms expert Davia Temin:

“This is a response scrubbed by a legal team with lawsuits in mind. It holds little to no accountability, which is what makes apologies so powerful. And it positions Kurtz almost as an AI voice — automated, soulless. In fact, ChatGPT does a better job of appearing to care than he does.”

A bundled attempt to apologize to partners with a gift card didn’t help, as captured in this PCGamer headline:

“After crashing 8.5 million computers, CrowdStrike says sorry to its partners with a $10 Uber Eats gift card, which was also broken.”

Ultimately and eventually, the company found its way to a full-throated apology, but the early missteps made a bad situation worse.

As Ben Horowitz wrote in “The Hard Thing About Hard Things:”

“If you are going to eat shit, don’t nibble.”

While an extreme case, CrowdStrike illustrates some of the tensions at play in any brand crisis — trying to balance responsibility and mitigate liability with incomplete information while still trying to fix the issue. The path of least resistance is a Mad Libs corporate apology that satisfies no one.

Far more effective than an apology is an amend. It’s not just about saying sorry — it’s about taking responsibility to make things right.

What’s at stake is everything invested in building a brand in the first place. As CrowdStrike CSO Shawn Henry put it, “The confidence we built in drips over the years was lost in buckets within hours.”

Keynote Talks with Humor and Insight

When not at the drafting table, I give cartoon-filled keynote talks around the world. Here are a few upcoming events. I hope to see some of you there!

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a related one from 2017.

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.