Redemption for Businesses

The Lounge General Discussion
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You have had a problem in the past, and you’ve done the work to make repair.

It may be a failure of commission, or things just spiralled down out of control. ( I will right now personally acknowledge both, and also acknowledge that sometines even the repair i’ve made could have been better. But this thread isn’t an AA meeting. )

Corporations and people in business have these problems too.

How should others react ? When are corporations and individuals doing business accepted back ?

( To be clear i am talking about the sorts of businesses that make things we talk about here in this forum – the music business. This thread is limited to redemption for music businesses. )

This topic comes up fairly regularly on this forum. ( It just did again – so let’s talk about it. )

I’m not going to name, names, it’s not the purpose here, nor really necessary, but if you look closely enough you’d most likely find more companies have had some sort of problems and flaws, and dealt with them, than have not.

So to name some general situations, fitting many companies.

  • A famous respected company has financial hardship. They may have filed bankruptcy, and gone out of business. This may likely have left some customers out, perhaps in product support, or more. Parts of that company form a new business doing similar things.

  • A company sells a hardware product that works well, but because of unforeseen hardware design limitations is limited in its software growth. The company decides to rev to a new hardware design, after a fairly short run with the first. They may have done this more than once.

  • A company crowdfunds a new product. Due to numerous possible factors they are unable to ship completed product for four years. But they do finally complete the product and ship it.

  • A company takes preorders for a product. The financial situation changes ( Brexit for example ) and they are forced to add additional charges like to pay taxes, though they also offer the option of full refund.

  • A large company is upset with the way they have been written about by one individual – perhaps quite justifiably upset. They post some sort of low level personal attack on that individual, but pretty quickly take that down, and apologize. It is unclear whether this indiscretion was made from the top or was a rogue decision.

  • A decade ago a small group of developers did their first startup, and got into difficulty due to inexperience. At that time, they did make whole all those involved. Today, ten years later, a few of the people involved in that project, and other people not involved make a new company, and a new product.

  • A company has comments of disapproval left about it on reddit.

These are just some examples, there are many others.

Notice that none of the premises i’ve presented here ( all pulled from real life examples ), involves any felony, nor likely even a misdemeanor. ( I do have shocking real world stories of egregious crime in the business world, but that’s over that clear red line, and outside the topic here. This thread is more about the things that happen from less extreme actions. )

I’ve read various comments in this forum, that i would consider rather harsh in reaction. But on the other hand, one needs to be aware and act reasonably, and responsibly.

This thread is about your thoughts actions and feelings, regarding companies with flaws, and how you negotiate this in your own mind.

Corporations involve many different people that can come and go over a period of time, And individuals learn and change over time too. Does that merit a change in reputation.

For you is it :

  • Clear – a one and done situation ?

  • Do you make considered decisions case by case along the way, willing to accept a company back under certain circumstances ?

  • Or are you the sort that takes little thought on that, and just carefully decides product by product, feature by feature, with your credit card protection ?

Or something else. All are legitimate and personal decisions.

And flipping this topic around, what sorts of things does a business need to do, to regain your confidence, and stay in the clear ?

When are businesses accepted back ?

EDIT : Typos.

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In a market with so much competition, I’m pretty much one and done. I could possibly make an exception if all of the stars aligned.

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First, I never bought any gear at or prior to its release. This always left plenty of room for technical research.

Second, I don‘t really care for the philosophy and ethics of companies on a consumer level that much. I mean if they really fuck up I guess I might think twice, but in the end I‘m just buying a silly product.

This leads to my conclusion that I was and possibly still am kind of immune to most of the cases you mentioned.

As for the best way an imaginary company could regain my imagenary respect: give fair and realistic compensation, apologize, but also deliver an original and functional product, have active support AND don‘t be stupid and add wi-fi, bluetooth, a touch screen or fucking AI to anything music related.

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I do care about the ethics of a company, and there are things I consider irredeemable. But most of the time, a company can earn back my trust by slightly overdelivering on their make up.

To cherry pick two examples:

Did the original hardware do everything it was advertised to do? Yes? Then this is a non-issue. I don’t care what year it is, if the company did not promise new software feature, they don’t owe you shit

Throw in the fact that said company attempted to trademark the individual’s name, and this becomes irredeemable

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I fall back to the point that businesses exist to make profits or they would be known as charities or NPOs, etc. Everything cuts both ways, consumers are ruthless and wants to pay the least and/or get most mileage which is fundamentally against the idea of maximising profit.

Hardware works with software here. Some companies/startups do very well in one but not the other, which resulted in certain scenarios above. Overestimating one’s capability & resources may very well do one in.

In terms of redemption, I think those who make it good again are far fewer compared to those that perished (I am guessing here). You could always start another new brand, business or acquire other firms to become too large to be ignored. Companies can be equally ruthless.

Then, there is this Internet garbage (accounting for 90% of the contents out there), which will propagate wrong/misleading information, and tend to snowball into bad reputation and brand damage for said company, long after the remedy. The social feeds can rehash stuff over a decade old and people will still consume it as the latest news about a company - would ya believe it.

I usually end up with “vote with your wallet to make something thrive or go away”.

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Depends so much on the business in question, and the ways they’ve wronged their users. If it can be uncontroversially perceived as intentional with knowing full well the implications for the affected individual and the highly questionable moral of the action I’m not ever touching them again. Certain manufacturers fall under this category

This is SOP outside music, seen it many times. You bankrupt to get rid of debt, purchase the assets cheap, and start over. I don’t like it, but it is what it is. What surprised me here is that investors/lenders/supply chain isn’t more upset about it, but I guess that’s part of business for them as well and they have mechanics they employ to protect themselves

Also not terrible, but depends very much on how it is handled. Selling mk1s full price with no word on a planned update then flipping the switch the next day selling mk2s isn’t great for customer friendlyness.

Only taken part in crowdfunding for one product but that went well. Issues arise during development and if they are clear in communication along the way and work hard to fulfill just that it takes longer then massive kudos to them. Crowdfunding is spreading the risk and funders need to understand that

Same as above tbh.

Depends a LOT on how this is handled afterwards.

Business as usual

I’ll tread carefully but at this stage of the online society most businesses have SOME unhappy users (users can be pricks too)

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I’m lax. I told myself I’d never buy Behringer but ended up getting a compressor from them because I wanted something cheap and reliable.

I can’t think of any company I’d never buy from again. I hate Roland’s menus, but their gear is cheap and classic so I’d buy again. I understand why some people hate teenage engineering, but I personally haven’t been screwed by them yet so I’m happy to take my chances. I’ve bought from loads of companies but nothing has been so bad that I’d blacklist them.

If someone has a really bad experience then I wouldn’t try to convince them to buy from that company again. There are so many options, and I don’t care about brand loyalty, so I’d encourage people to shop how they like.

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I’m glad you were mindful of this, but I think you can take this a step further. A number of your examples involve legal conditions such as bankruptcy. While these are usually not criminal matters, a serious motivation for having legal systems with predictable outcomes is … .predictable outcomes. We may not always like those outcomes, but in a reasonably functional society they should help us calm down when we are mad and put the pitchforks away. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get mad or decline to do business with the successor entity. We just agree not to BBQ anyone we are mad at who violated their contract with us.

Some specific, vibe-based (not AI) answers:

  • Overextended on hardware, software limited: I’ve been a huge nerd since the mid '80s or so and am extremely familiar with this one. It happens a lot because hardware and software are both difficult in different ways. Reputation is one way around this - look at a company’s prior work and evaluate whether that is acceptable to you. If they change their behavior then I might avoid buying from them for some time. I’m still mad at Apple for their design decisions regarding external storage, but all of the alternatives are worse. So I continue to buy Apple products.

  • My feelings on crowdfunding are complex, but a simplified version is that cases like a book that has been written but is expensive to print are fine but “you are providing venture money for me to design and manufacture a cool new thing!” is not, unless I’m both getting equity in the company and the initial products cost at least 10x the final manufactured product. I feel like the standard terms for crowdfunding are dangerously bad for both makers and buyers, so I avoid involvement.

  • Companies being shitty is also a bit complex. Sometimes a company’s behavior is shitty because of one rogue employee, though the company itself is always ultimately responsible. Sometimes a company’s behavior is shitty because the company simply lacks respect for its customer and is happy to be shitty for short term gains. I evaluate on a case by case basis, but prefer not to do business with those who are disrespectful to their customers wherever possible.

  • Reddit is very much a mixed bag (I’m being as polite as I can possibly be, I’ve revised that statement several times already), I would need to know a lot more about the negative comments before I could have an opinion on whether to take them seriously. I used to take user reviews very seriously, but marketing agencies have known this for well over a decade and astroturfing is always on their menu.

I’m not sure who said it first, but in a business context trust is easy to lose, hard to gain back.

Weird edge case: there is a well known synth maker that identifies as a citizen of one nation while residing in the capital of a different nation that happens to be engaged in a bloody war with this person’s (claimed) home nation. I don’t believe it is possible for me to have enough information to properly judge the situation, so I won’t be buying any of their products until the war is concluded and the situation can be clarified. Not only do I prefer to avoid companies that treat their customers badly, but in general I do not want my fun to be built on others’ suffering or even the perception of others’ suffering. (NOTE: if you want to discuss this, please DM me, I am not interested in having this discussion in public and I doubt Jukka wants to see their thread move in that direction)

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I think redemption is always possible to the extent making existing customers whole is possible. That’s like delivering what you took money for, continuing to support products etc.

I’ve sorta learnt my lesson now wrt hardware. I am less and less likely to be an early adopter, especially if it’s a newer company with little to no track record.

I have dodged some bullets but definitely taken a few. There’s very little thats compelling to me in the hardware space any more.

The most common thing I see is hardware makers severely underestimating the difficulty of software.

There’s some great music tech out there and part of what makes it great is how easy the UI/UX/Software makes it seem.

It takes a lot of talent and experience built up over years of trial and error to make great software. I’m sure most of us can rattle off a list of great seeming hardware that’s been let down by its software.

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Maybe it’s only my observation, but some of most respected companies with this problem had an attitude of resting on their laurels. Once they were pioneers of the technology. At the end they did copy what was successful decades ago.

I remember the release of a “new - polyphonic” synth that cost quite a lot. IMO the sound was great as expected, but somehow more “traditional” rather than “new”.

Some time later there was one of those disrupting announcements “… we are proud to become part of a ‘very big’ business organisation and will contribute and benefit from the mutual synergy …”

There are more examples … Think of all the “Rolls Royce” companies of music and other industries … this will happen again … there is nothing we as customers can do … just to secure a reliable repair shop. I can live with it …

I love crowdfund - because I had no bad experience … knock on wood.

Yes, one delivered after many excuses quite late, but the product prototype had something, which I suspected to be very useful for many musicians. They updated us regularly and it made sense. Now they deliver release 2.x hardware.

Another case was an “experimental” synth, offered from a company that had already good reputation. I guess they couldn’t afford to develop such instrument without any financial backup. It became a great instrument.

I think it’s important to balance risk and benefit carefully and try to understand, who is offering what. Shortcomings in parts or inexperienced business people are a risk we have to accept or to say no. For me it’s a case by case decision and some research …

Just to make this clear. For me preorder and prepayment are different cases. The music shop I preorder regularily askes only for payment before or after shipment … that’s fair.

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In my day jobs, I have spent more than 30 years of my working life either within multinational corporation leadership teams or, more recently, advising MNC global leadership teams. None of them have been in the musical instrument sector but I have worked with some very large tech firms which can have similar characteristics to MI firms (big bets on new products that flop spectacularly, for example, and undermine investor confidence). I’ve worked with PE-backed entities and also very large dual-listed public companies. I’ve also worked in the international energy sector where everything is about long-term planning, looking over the horizon and thinking about the worst thing that can happen.

The first point I’d highlight is, companies are always shaped by the character of the CEO. If the CEO is a thoughtful visionary who thinks big but also cares about the small stuff and genuinely cares about the well-being of his/her employees, that company will not only be a good place to work, there’s a good chance it will produce quality products supported by quality employees who care about their customers. The American poet Ralph Emerson wrote that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man” and IME that is always and profoundly true in any company, big or small. I have turned down jobs in the past that look great on paper but when I met the CEO, the vibe was all wrong.

If you come across a company where the CEO communicates with customers, listens to them and responds to them, that company is a way better bet than a company led by an elusive genius who listens to nobody and whose employees live in fear.

Second point: companies fuck up, often. It’s unavoidable. And the bigger they are, the longer it takes for the leadership to realise that something is wrong unless the failure is so catastrophic it’s all over the media from day one (like a global cyberattack).

When something goes wrong down at the working level of a company, the natural human instinct is to try to fix it at your level without having to call in your boss. Only when you realise it’s too big for you to fix do you call in the boss to elevate the whole thing. Then your boss has the same instinct: he/she wants to fix it at his/her level without having to call in his or her boss. Only when the boss can’t fix it either does it then go one step up the chain. This pattern repeats itself, upwards layer by upwards layer, until finally it gets into the leadership team. By which point it is a pretty damn big problem and it’s going to be a tough bastard to sort out.

It’s why my team and I always used to dread what we called the “Friday Night Phone Call”. Problem emerged on Monday, couldn’t be fixed, escalated on Tuesday, couldn’t be fixed, same pattern on Wednesday, then Thursday, then at some point on Friday afternoon it became clear this was now into major fuck-up territory so it was time to ruin a bunch of weekends at leadership level. I’m not joking, the Friday Night Phone Call was a clear, recognisable pattern that I’ve lived through dozens of times in my various day jobs.

This is a really important aspect of corporate culture that IME is massively misunderstood. When companies screw up, IME they very rarely set out on day one with the intention of covering the whole thing up. What happens is people at different levels try, then fail, to put the thing right, and as they reluctantly concede defeat and accept they have to escalate internally, step by step the problem gets worse and harder to fix. By the time it gets to the top, it lands on the leadership’s desk as a glowing WTAF toxic asteroid that’s come out of nowhere, and going back down through the chain to the very bottom to reverse engineer everything and sort it out is (often) fiendishly complex. And at that point, the corporate lawyers (internal and external counsel) will be saying “say nothing until we know exactly what the hell happened here” because they are worried about litigation risk, while the comms and community relations people will be demanding the exact opposite… essentially “FFS it’s all over the media and socials, we can’t just sit here and say nothing”. I’ve been in the room for these moments far too many times. It is very tough. And usually the lawyers win the day (because money) and the company tries to tough it out for days, then weeks, then months, sometimes even years.

The third point is owning the mistake. Stepping up, led visibly by the CEO, and saying “we are truly sorry, we got this wrong, here is why it happened, here’s how we’re fixing it, here’s what we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and here’s how we’re going to make whole anyone who’s been affected”. This is crisis management 101 but I cannot tell you how many companies stumble in doing this.

Usually it is the fear of litigation that gets in the way. Sometimes it’s just not possible to make everyone whole again (sadly I’ve worked on over a dozen multiple fatality crises… companies can and do compensate families eventually, but a life lost isn’t coming back). But, most commonly IME there’s a part of the company, at some level, that just won’t accept they did anything wrong. There is a strong internal resistance to contrition. That resistance can be fierce and obdurate… “it was all down to the media/influencers who are biased against us, it wasn’t our fault”, or “management are throwing us under the bus to save themselves”, “it wasn’t our fault, our suppliers screwed up and we are taking the hit”, “XYZ politician hates us and this is their chance to take us down” and many other versions of the same angle. Either way, part of the institution becomes the roadblock to doing what’s right and necessary. It’s a shitty situation to be in, and it takes a strong CEO with an impeccable moral compass to cut through it all.

It may sound crazy to compare the MI industry (which is tiny overall and dominated by boutique firms) with enormous global MNCs, but ultimately people are people and behaviours under pressure when things go wrong are similar everywhere. It’s why I would never personalise my dissatisfaction or frustration with a poor product from any company. I know what it’s like to go through that heartsick feeling when the wheels come off. And I know what good looks like when companies try to put it right.

It’s why I know I’ll end up buying a Tonverk eventually (and, really, I will) because Elektron know they messed up, they’ve talked to us about how they got it wrong and I know they will put it right. There is a culture within that company that just feels grounded, solid and worthy of trust. And there are other companies whose products I will never buy based on what I have seen of their culture, willingness to communicate, and lack of honesty.

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I have seen some people experiencing personal tragedies that impacted their professional lives, both in my day job and in the context of this thread.

It made me very conscious that sometimes bad things happen and its not always possible to discuss openly.

Like if a key staff member has a serious medical or family issue and wont be able to work on a planned project. At smaller place or in very niche domains certain skillsets are very difficult to replace, particularly if they are senior/leadership people.

But like the company cant turn around and publicly say “oh hey our guy bob is real sick” cause thats confidential medical information.

I do think in the vast majority of cases when things go south there are often extenuating circumstances, particularly in places like music gear where personal passion is a huge driver, and smaller places only really have their reputation.

I have also seen some examples of people that take the money and not do any of the work, even lying to their colleagues and coworkers. Even that is usually due to extenuating circumstances.

If you are on the other side of the fence, left waiting or holding the bag it doesn’t make it any easier. Theres a balance between privacy, truth and reasonable expectations.

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Great contribution with so much truth …

We must remember that “every big problem was once a small one”.

IMO many organisations are dominated by a ‘fear of punishment’ rather than an attitude of ‘we are tolerant of mistakes’. Those attitudes always work from top to bottom.

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It’s also become apparent to me that there is also the factor of the caprice of public opinion. Yes a company has done something in the past, but this can then take on a force out of proportion to that past.

It doesn’t need a specific example, this fits many corporations in perception. But what brought this to mind was Fender who over the past five years has carefully built a new music products division, and yet meets expressed rejection. ( Scorn ?? )

So then just in the general sense, is there redemption for businesses ?

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Do people still buy Ford cars in the us?

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Cars are interesting to consider, as an analogy. There develops such strong brand loyalties and aversions far outside actual merits. It even expands out then to country of origin of the car brand too.

I think the same holds true for some with electronic musical instrument brands, and considering it, with country of origin too.

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I moved from a place where probably half of cars are Fords because they are cheap and wages are low, to a place where it seems half of cars are Japanese brands and the Prius is probably the average car on the road. I myself drove a Ford for like a decade solely because it was the only car I could afford at the time I bought it.

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Interesting choice of example. Fender seems to be actively working to foster scorn:

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If a company shows themselves to be scummy or untrustworthy, I don’t think that typically excludes “older” products from the equation. Is the thinking that, because the recent aggression towards other makers in the space happened after the creation of said product, they’re automatically expected not to be aggressive regarding this pre existing product? Well we know this not to be true because they clearly showed aggression out of nowhere involving a product that is 72 years old.

I’ll also reiterate the point here that the product is not “5 years old” in the eyes of the consumer. You may have extra context of the development phase of the product, but this isn’t even a glancing thought in the mind of a consumer. For all intents and purposes, this is a brand new product, introduced by a company that has just made some very silly moves. It’s impossible and illogical not to take that into consideration in this case.

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I fully agree, but also I feel this is insanely rare these days. Personal experience did not prove me wrong so far, unfortunately.

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