Week 10:Personal & Organizational Brand Meltdowns
One of the biggest personal and organizational brand meltdowns in recent history is the Jared Fogle child pornography scandal. Jared’s involvement in child pornography and participating in sexual acts with minors directly affected Subway and its marketing strategy. Jared was a big part of Subway’s success by documenting his weight loss journey. Years ago people wanted to be like Jared and lose weight by eating Subway sandwiches. After the scandal broke Subway had to scramble and figure out a way to address this story. Subway’s identity is being a smarter and healthier choice of fast food compared to the unhealthy choices like McDonald’s. Referring to the book and chapter 7 I think Jared was like Subway’s “storyteller”. “The storyteller seeks to build an integrated and meaningful identity by crafting a story of the self that is coherent across time and space” (202). Jared used his own identity story, which was about weight loss and connected it with Subway’s identity. Due to Jared’s story Subway gained customers and expanded their restaurants. Now after the scandal Subway has to find a new identity without Jared. Subway hasn’t responded too well to the scandal. The only statement that the organization has made said “We no longer have a relationship with Jared and have no further comment”. I think Subway could have done a little more to settle the situation. I feel like they made that short comment so people would stop talking about it. I know the Jared scandal is still pretty recent but I hope Subway is able to make something good out of this and establish a better identity away from Jared. Although Jared doesn’t represent what Subway stands for he still affected some customer’s views of the organization.
Another personal and organizational meltdown is when Chik-Fil-A’s CEO Dan Cathy made homophobic remarks. This directly affected the organization because this was the CEO making these remarks and he never really apologized either. This affected Chik-Fil-A’s leadership identity. After these remarks it was also discovered that the organization donated millions of dollars to antigay rights groups. Chik-Fil-A’s identity became a homophobic organization. LGBT supporters began a boycott of all Chik-Fil-A restaurants. This is not the type of identity that the organization imagined and knew that the CEO’s views didn’t agree with the company’s, employee’s or customer’s views. In the aftermath Cathy released a statement stating that he made a mistake and he didn’t want his comments to distract the public from the restaurant. In the summer of 2015 a Chik-Fil-A in Iowa actually donated food to the Iowa City Pride Fest. I think that was a great move by the organization to gain their true identity back. Some people still think of Chik-Fil-A as a homophobic organization and in order to change this the company needs to do things like they did in Iowa.
A third organizational meltdown that caused negative views about an organization was the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil spilled into the water for months causing loss of life and damage to the beaches and water. Even after BP said the well was sealed there were reports that it was still leaking. BP was criticized for taking so long to seal the well. Thousands of people and communities were affected by this and people wanted answers. BP was also accused of lying about the amount of oil that was spilled in to the Gulf. This greatly affected the organization’s identity and they were seen as untrustworthy. Since the spill BP has maintained that they have done everything they could to control the spill. They wanted to make their presence known in the affected areas so the public would know they were trying to fix the situation. People were boycotting BP gasoline after the spill to show that this was not acceptable. All of the stories above affected the organization’s identity and they took certain steps to fix their identities.
