After the PR disaster of Apple’s “Mr Grumpy” Steve Jobs (Mr Scrumpy?) telling clients to “hold the phone differently”, they certainly went to town to contextualise the problem in the resulting press conference, Antenna-gate, cleverly proving that all the other phones have crappy reception as well.
Rule number one of crisis management and PR = contextualise the problem, the kind of thing that has airline CEO’s say “a million people a day fly and only 200 died today” or “no walruses have died in the Gulf of Mexico”, if I may use some rather cruel analogies.
It shows that Apple have just as many spin doctors as New Labour used to – perhaps that’s where they all went?
What did impress me, however, was the way in which I got my “bumper” money back.
I expected a long process of reclaiming the receipt from my accountant and a laborious journey to my nearest Apple store (170 miles each way) to wrestle with the admin system and a disinterested teenager in a pastel coloured t-shirt sporting a chirpy and humorous phrase like “I’m your bumper baby – try me”.
But no – they nailed it, and whilst I swam in a sea of cheap Greek wine and calamari, they refunded direct to my credit card, no paper, no questions asked.
That was cool.
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