People want to know you care before they care what you know.
Michael Ricci is a partner at Seven Letter.
We are too smart for our own good, particularly when things go bad. That is the expertise trap at the heart of crisis communications today.
The apparel-maker Fanatics was caught flat-footed earlier this year before Super Bowl LX when they didn’t have nearly enough Patriots and Seahawks jerseys for purchase. Classic “you had one job” failure.
The company did what most companies do. It apologized, and rightly so. “We’ve let Patriots and Seahawks fans down with product availability, we own that and we are sorry.” Easy enough. But then came the next paragraph, explaining that both teams had missed the playoffs the year before, demand was up 400 percent, and it was all an “incredibly rare occurrence.”
This defied logic. Both teams had been in the playoff hunt for months; this matchup clearly wasn’t out of the blue. Fans became even more livid than they already were. If you consider “do no harm” a core crisis communications tenet, Fanatics failed at this one job too.
Notice how, under pressure, companies and institutions often become excuse factories. They reach for facts and tortured explanations when people need to feel seen and heard. They speak in paragraphs when eight words or less will do the trick. And in doing so, they both undermine the point of apologizing in the first place, and create more problems for themselves.
In April, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill had to defend NJ Transit’s plan to charge World Cup fans $150 for a train ride that normally runs $12.90. She reached for the same playbook, saying, “In the agreement that my Administration inherited, FIFA put zero dollars towards transporting World Cup fans.” Technically true that this was her predecessor’s doing, but beside the point. You can’t feed the public spin at the exact moment it is looking for ownership. “This isn’t my fault” sounds nothing like “we will make this right.” It sounds like the opposite of that, of course.
Then there’s the sports nutrition company UCAN. Recently, when elite marathoner Emma Bates shared on social media that the company dropped her sponsorship after she told them she was pregnant, UCAN responded with a timeline in an Instagram comment. The decision was made in September. It predated any knowledge of her pregnancy. It was part of regular business planning. The whole thing read like a legal memo.
Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said: “Never ruin an apology with an excuse.” And as usual, his wisdom is timeless.
The instinct to explain is understandable, especially in our time, when brands and organizations have so much information and analytics at their disposal. Entities are paralyzed by groupthink that fosters the shared delusion that the right facts can defuse any situation. As if the public will say, oh, well, okay, now that they’ve explained it to us, nevermind…
Dr. Vincent Covello’s research on risk communication makes clear why this is a faulty assumption, at best. In a crisis, empathy — not expertise— is the gateway to trust. People decide emotionally before they evaluate intellectually. This is why unequivocal apologies work. They show that you are listening and create space for repairing trust; that short-term pain sets up long-term recovery. Excuses and explanations compete with this work. They don’t complement it and often detract from it.
So what are the eight words or less people want to hear in these situations? We got it wrong. It won’t happen again. Or some variation on that. That’s where it starts. From there, you lay out a plan to do better.
This is not, to be clear, a case for simply apologizing your way out of every problem. Research does show that a brand can enhance its reputation when it handles a problem well. But there are also times when saying sorry could create more liability and do more harm than good.
One thing that’s clear is that excuses are rarely the path of least resistance. People want to know you care before they care what you know. They want those eight words of ownership, not three paragraphs of context and caveats. In the right hands, and with the right approach, a crisis is where trust is built, not broken.
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