Don't defend or excuse your mistakes—own them
It’s inevitable that brands will make mistakes. The bar consumers have set for brands is higher than ever before, and whether it’s a tone-deaf campaign or failing to address a social crisis, marketers should prepare for the occasional misstep and its blowback. But, in many cases, the brand response to an error is watched 10 times more closely than the original mistake itself. “A lot of times, brands don’t know how to respond [to mistakes] appropriately because they don’t have the right people internally,” says Yari Blanco, senior manager of multicultural partnerships at Twitter, who adds that ignoring missteps, being defensive or giving excuses can all break consumers’ hard-earned, harder-to-repair trust. To avoid making many of the industry’s most common mistakes, she believes it’s critical for marketers to use a multicultural lens when decisions are being made. “If you don’t have the right people in the room that feel empowered and have agency,” she says, “no one’s going to call you out in that boardroom and be like, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t do this, because I see the iceberg.’”