Brandjack News

Amazon Web Services had a day long outage which affected thousands of companies. This author was locked out of Canvas, the virtual learning environment used at one of the universities where he teaches. (Fortunately, this made no difference. The students had assessed debates that day). The Starbucks App was non-functional for a few hours.

Large organizations such as Starbucks would have been able to shift their hosting and WordPress was largely unaffected, but there are many organizations dependent on AWS.

AWS is the largest cloud computing host, ahead of rivals such as Microsoft and Google.

Some countries are starting to get concerned at being dependent on three American companies, though all three businesses have multinational operations many of which are outside the control of the US and would be unaffected by a natural disaster or government takeover in America.

Plainly, this is going to hit Amazon’s reputation with its major customers. So far the company has been reluctant to share details but will probably need to be transparent as its investigation uncovers more about the causes.

A policy of radical transparency should help assuage fears about some of its future reliability.

Welcome to WordPress! This is your first post. Edit or delete it to take the first step in your blogging journey.

If you believe the coverage in the general media then every rebranding ever has been a failure. That's because news stories require conflict and any rebranding that goes well is not a story: "company pays reasonable price for rather attractive new logo" is as newsworthy as "plane lands safely without incident". 

So the first lesson we can draw from this experience is that we should not even try to make a story out of a rebranding. The chances that the story will be reported positively, other than in specialist publications such as Ad Age and Marketing Week, are as close to zero as makes no difference. 

Successful rebrandings – such as the slow evolution of the Apple logo, or its staged shift from "Mac" to "i" – are not trumpeted. They are just implemented. 

Cracker Barrel probably thought it was doing something similar. First it began to shift the menu and then the decor in an effort to attract a younger demographic. Only when this was in place did it seek to modernize the logo. 

This brings us to the second lesson. People tend to have more loyalty to logos than marketers imagine. That's a bit odd, given that marketers devote a lot of effort to getting people to be loyal to brands. Why would they then be surprised if it works? It may be that people don't even realize how much affection they have for some element of the brand – the logo, or famously the taste of Coke – until it has gone. Then the nostalgia kicks in. 

Of course, people had not been showing much loyalty to Cracker Barrel. It had been losing market share. The problem is that by dumping the "heritage" logo the company was alienating the remaining customers. The ones who were loyal. 

Add to this the bizarre claim that the new logo was somehow "woke". The brand had certainly done other things which may have alienated some of its more conservative customers, such as supporting LGBTQ causes, as part of that effort to appeal to a younger market. And the old logo had an "old-timey" feel about it. It dates to the 1970s, but evokes a still earlier time. 

Older, nostalgia-driven, customers remained a part of the brand even as it introduced a successful app aimed at younger clientele. Changing the logo seems like rubbing the older customers' noses in the other changes. 

It is little wonder the company backed down in days after major stock market falls and criticism from one of the founders. 

Boeing, the second largest aircraft manufacturer in the world, is facing a multiplicity of crises, but the wholly peculiar nature of the industry makes it unclear how these will unfold. 

The company is losing money, and has been for some years. The Max 737 was supposed to be the solution. It seemed like a very competitive product, but two crashes and 346 fatalities in a short space of time led to production being suspended. Investigations uncovered whistleblowers saying safety procedures were being compromised. Then a door plug flew off a 737 in flight. Although there were no fatalities, the huge publicity surrounding the issue was a massive blow to the company. 

And now it faces a strike by machinists seeking a big pay rise and promises that jobs will not be relocated from Washington State to South Carolina, a right-to-work state where employees cannot be forced to join a union. 

The company is seeking to borrow $25 billion and credit rating agencies warn it faces the risk of being downgraded to junk. 

Surely this is a great opportunity for the strikers to win their struggle. The company is borrowing at great cost and is already facing a backlog in delivering its orders. How long can it hold out? 

Well, the answer may be that it can hold out longer than the strikers. There is a multi-year lead time on orders just in the ordinary course of events. A delay of six months or a year on product that the customer is not expecting before the end of the decade can probably be negotiated or perhaps the time can be made up. Immediate term deliveries were already delayed by regulatory action. 

Nor can Boeing lose orders to a rival. Its only significant competitor is Airbus, which is also struggling and also facing a backlog. It is not in a position to take on new orders for short-term delivery. 

Of course, it is difficult for Boeing that it is trying to shed staff at a time when it cannot handle existing orders. That would normally be an opportunity to expand its manufacturing capacity. 

So, what is the resolution? 

Could the business be acquired by new management? That's definitely a possibility, but it would not solve the short-term problems. Manufacturing bottlenecks and regulatory issues cannot be simply wished away. A takeover bid is probably not an available solution for the backlogs at Airbus, as around 25% of the shares are owned by European governments (Germany, France, and Spain) and a hostile takeover would need approval by worker representatives. 

That so much manufacturing capacity is held by just two companies means that the market could not quickly adapt to the failure of either of them. That may be the lifeline that keeps Boeing alive. 

Boar's Head is an upmarket brand in the deli meats and cheeses market. Last month it recalled over 200,000 lbs (almost 100,000 KG) of meat following a listeria outbreak.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported multiple "non compliances" against the company had been noted in a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Report referring to 57 different days between August 2023 and July 2024. While regulators sometimes claim they are under resourced and cannot cope with the number of inspections required to keep the food chain hygienic, in this case the USDA seems to have been conducting the inspections, but follow up action seems to have been sparse. 

We certainly don't have all the facts in this case, but we do know that there are often failures in regulation for a number of different reasons:

1. Regulatory Capture: sometimes the regulators end up acting in the interests of the regulated industry, not the public. 
2. Inadequate enforcement powers: sometimes regulators have the will to enforce, but lack the powers.
3. Over-regulation: sometimes regulations are so onerous it is impossible to avoid breaching them, so regulated industries treat the fines as an inevitable cost of business. 
4. Inadequate management: sometimes the business lacks the capacity to reform itself. 

We don't know which, if any, of the above applies in this instance. 

What does seem likely is that greater transparency would have helped. With numerous breaches of regulations, including some which are serious, such as "mold, mildew, and insects", the company would seem to have a clear interest in cleaning things up even if fines were not administered or were inadequate. The risk of litigation and reputational damage are plainly significant in this instance, and were even before the deadly listeria outbreak, which will be connected with the issue in the public mind, even if the hygiene failures did not cause the deaths. 

Ultimately, reports such as this are covered by the Freedom of Information Act. The information does get out, but if that is after extensive delays the company may have already improved the situation before anyone has a chance to act on the information. A hurried report, to which the company has not had a chance to respond, could easily cause a lot of harm if it was incorrect or lacked critical context, but proceeding as quickly as possible towards full transparency seems to be of great value to the public. 

If the USDA had unequivocal evidence of serious hygiene problems last year, relying on whistleblowers to put the matter in the public domain is a policy failure. If this information was not publicly shared early in the process, we should ask why not. 

There's often tension about whether or not to apologize in a crisis. Attorneys will generally advise not to. Communications professionals are more likely to favor the idea. But one thing should be clear. If you apologize, you need to be sincere and transparent. You need to accept the scale of what has gone wrong. The breaking news about Alexander Morris of the Four Tops seems to exhibit the worst of all worlds. Here's the story:

Morris went to hospital in Michigan with clear signs of cardiac distress. When he identified himself as a member of the legendary Motown group, it seems that staff did not believe him. They put him on psychiatric watch and into a straitjacket. 

The hospital has not commented, as there's a strong chance of litigation. Morris claims racial discrimination, among other things.

It's not clear how hospital staff got from (wrongly, it seems) assessing him as delusional to deciding that he needed to be restrained. 

Since we don't have enough information to judge the hospital's actions on that point just yet, let's look instead at the offer to compensate Morris with a $25 gift card. (For a retailer, not for future hospital visits). 

Attorneys usually advise against apologies because they seem to acknowledge liability. Offers of compensation are usually made "without prejudice", meaning you can't hold the fact that they made the offer as an admission of liability. 

Communicators often advise in favor of apology, because there is real evidence that it eases bad feeling and makes litigation less likely. 

The problem with an offer of compensation that is derisory if that it seems to accept liability without mitigating any bad feeling. 

This was not just a situation in which a couple of nurses giggled at his claim to be a member of a prominent singing group. It started a process which led to a straitjacket.

Maybe the hospital plans to claim that he became belligerent and the straitjacket decision was justified. If so, they should be clear that they stand by this decision, and the compensation is only because of the misunderstanding about his identity. A better approach would be to immediately apologize for the mistake about his identity, but say they are still investigating the decision to put him in a straitjacket, and will be transparent when that investigation is complete. 

American media do not seem to have jumped straight in to allocating blame for the collision of the Dali with the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore. The bridge collapsed almost immediately. 

As an analyst of media coverage, not an engineer, Brandjack News can't help wondering why the media are being so reticent. This was not the case with, for example, the BP oil spill in 2010. 

Certainly, the ownership and responsibility in this case is complicated. The ship is owned and operated by a company based in Singapore (Synergy Group) and chartered by the Danish logistics company, Maersk. Maersk's branding is clearly visible on the containers in many of the media visuals. 

But complexity was an issue in 2010, too. The oil rig was owned by one company and operated by another. Several partners were involved in the construction. But the media almost immediately latched on to BP as the target of all blame. 

Perhaps the media are awaiting reports from the NTSB, which investigates transportation disasters. Maybe, but waiting for the facts is not standard operating procedure. The story is current NOW, and the media usually want a villain when they are conducting their initial reports. 

Perhaps the biggest difference is that in 2010 the media could identify as villain a business with a well known brand: BP. In this case, both Synergy Group and Maersk are huge global businesses, but few consumers deal with them directly. 

Maersk has also seen barely a blip in its share price since the accident, though it has been on a slight downward trend this year in any case. The fall on March 26th was barely perceptible, and the price that day was up on a week previously. It has recovered slightly since then. It seems as though markets are not expecting Maersk to face a big liability. 

By Quentin Langley

The terrifying accident in which a door plug came off an Alaska Airlines Boeing Max 9 while in flight has heavily hit the company's reputation. People are calling for regulation to be tightened and for the FAA to have more resources to inspect Boeing facilities. Websites are offering people the chance to exclude flights with Max 9's from their searches. 

That sounds sensible, at first. But let's bear a few things in mind.

1. Terrifying as this incident was, no one was killed. 
2. Flying is, by a huge margin, the safest way to travel. Literally years at a time can go by without anyone being killed by an accident in flight. 

What if flying is too safe? 

What could I possibly mean by "too safe"? Surely we all want flights to be as safe as possible? Well, no, we don't. That's what people say with regard to pretty much all decisions, but it is not how people actually make decisions. We want a reasonable level of safety.

If increasing regulations make it slower to manufacture new planes, then longer periods will pass between replacing old equipment. Slowing down the modernization of the fleet could actually make flying more dangerous. 

But it isn't just that. If you require more frequent checks of planes between flights then you will increase delays of flights and increase the cost of flying. Cost and convenience are the two most important factors in people's decision making when deciding how to travel. Safety barely features. Increasing prices and delays will push people to travel by some other means.

And traveling by some other means is vastly more dangerous. This is not even close. Every form of transport, including walking, has more deaths per billion passenger kilometers than flying. Walking is actually the second most dangerous, after motorcycling. (It is not a remotely close second). 

The problem here is that the regulatory brief is all wrong and so are the incentives. The FAA has to minimize the number of people killed in air accidents. Its leadership will be lambasted in the media if accidents seem to be on the rise. But if the cost of each life saved in air accidents is that many – probably hundreds – of additional people will be killed on the roads, then flying is too safe. It has reached a level of safety so absurdly out of proportion with other modes of transport that the imbalance is killing people. 

Yes, I found reports of the Alaskan Airlines incident scary. I didn't even know planes had "plugged" doorways. Apparently it is because if the airline puts in more and smaller seats it is required to have more doors. Come to think of it, perhaps that is a regulation which should be reviewed as creating more danger than safety. But whether that regulation makes sense or not is something that should be determined by data, not by panic. One reason air incidents – even those with no fatalities – get massively reported is that they are extremely rare. 

So let's go with data. And the data suggest that safety would be served by making flying cheaper. If that means a handful of extra deaths in flight, more than balanced by hundreds of lives saved on the roads, we should go with that. 

Disney fires Majors
Disney, which owns the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, has dismissed actor Jonathan Majors, who has been playing Kang the Conqueror, the new adversary of the franchise, and was due to appear in this role in the fifth movie of the Avengers series.
Majors has just been convicted of assault and harassment charges against his then girlfriend, though the jury acquitted on some other charges.
Disney has been praised for acting swiftly, on the day of the verdict. Since the trial has been ongoing, Disney certainly knew that there would be a verdict shortly, and it would not have been hard to agree two alternative statements well in advance. The verdict did not come out of nowhere, and there was plenty of time to prepare.
Marvel now needs to either recast the role or change the creative direction of Avengers 5, which was previously known as The Kang Dynasty. The change in title suggests that they are keeping their options open.
Action movies in particular need to be careful about promoting as stars (even portraying villains) actors with convictions for acts of violence, so the decision to fire him was probably an easy one, if potentially very expensive.