Canadians hold their homegrown companies to a high moral standard, but a marketing expert believes Joe Fresh and its parent company Loblaw are making the right corrective steps as they navigate their way through the tragedy of the Bangladesh factory collapse.
When a building in Bangladesh that housed five garment factories – including one that worked for Joe Fresh – collapsed on April 24, the news quickly spread internationally. As of Tuesday afternoon, the death toll has exceeded 700. Media coverage of Joe Fresh’s connection to the event has been constant since the disaster.
Tandy Thomas, an assistant marketing professor at Queen’s School of Business said Canadians have usually perceived Joe Fresh as a “beloved” company because it’s a family-friendly brand where parents pick up clothes for their kids and it offers “convenient, good-quality products at a good price.”
When Canadians learned of the company’s involvement in such a horrible incident, Thomas said their first impression would be shock. “And it’s shock because what happened is such a grave tragedy, which is in direct contrast to all of the great associations that consumers have with the Joe Fresh brand,” she said.
It’s not common for Canadian companies to be associated with this kind of tragedy, she said, so it’s “something that’s a bit foreign to us.” She says something of this nature will “strike a little close to home because Canadians tend to hold Canadian companies to a higher moral standard than they do those of other countries.”
The initial consumer reaction to this type of incident, she said, is usually boycotting, but the length of the overall customer response depends on the actions Loblaw takes to rectify the situation.
“In this situation, it does look like Loblaws is doing all the things that it should be doing to make this right,” she said. “By that I’m not talking about engaging in fancy PR to try and improve their image. It looks like Loblaws is taking tangible actions to find out what went wrong.”
This, she said, includes sending high-level executives to Bangladesh to explore the situation and figure out how they can prevent it from happening again. “With those kinds of actions, consumers will take notice and [believe] a mistake happened, but Loblaws is taking responsibility and they are doing what needs to be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And consumers tend to respond very well to those kinds of actions.”
Thomas believes consumers will forgive, “and, in many cases, they come back with a stronger level of loyalty because they know they can trust the company to do the right thing again in the future.”
Time is of the essence for brands when it comes to how they respond in these situations. “The initial reaction is very important, because that’s when the media is giving it attention and that’s when consumers are paying attention,” said Thomas. She added that a brand’s follow-through is equally important “because they’ve been making promises now and if they fail to deliver on those promises, consumers will notice that, and media will definitely notice that.”
Thomas believes the only way companies can really come out of this kind of negative situation well is to do the right thing – be honest and humble, acknowledge mistakes were made and take real action to fix them. “Unless companies do that, they’re not going to win back their consumers and they’re not doing what’s considered to be morally correct for companies operating in this global marketplace.”
During an address to media last week, Loblaw executive chairman Galen Weston and Joe Fresh founder Joe Mimran confirmed that Joe Fresh will continue to make clothes in Bangladesh, and use this experience to improve building standards for textile factories there.
Joe Fresh has other problems abroad as its partnership with JC Penney in the U.S. is in flux. Read “Fresh Doubts About Joe’s Partner” in the May 20 issue of Marketing. Subscribe today.
