The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Japan’s Kanebo battles to rescue brand after skin-blotch scandal Posted: 14 Sep 2013 08:15 PM PDT Japan's second-largest cosmetics firm – more than a century old and with its reputation for quality now in tatters – can recover, they say, but it has to move swiftly and surely. Kanebo's travails are the latest in a long line of public relations disasters that have felled companies of all sizes. Among the casualties are Boeing's troubled Dreamliner jet and automaker Toyota, which was forced to recall millions of cars in recent years over safety issues. A tainted milk scandal in China that left six children dead and sickened more than 300,000 badly scarred the country's dairy industry. Key to surviving brand-damaging episodes is a quick response that is transparent and genuine, public relations experts say. "Don't simply broadcast information – like many Japanese companies do – but promote two-way communication with all stakeholder groups" including customers, said Daniel Fath, vice president of Tokyo-based Total Communications System. "Handled properly, a traumatic crisis becomes a valuable learning experience that ultimately strengthens a company's relationships with its stakeholders." In an effort to put a stop to a spiralling public relations disaster, Kanebo's president went before the cameras this week to apologise to customers. They included nearly 10,000 people left with uneven pigmentation after using its skin-whitening creams, which are popular among women across Asia in search of lighter tones. The embattled executive pledged to overhaul safety controls at the company while temporarily cutting his salary and that of other senior executives. But his bid to defuse the situation came as a team of external experts appointed by the firm said it had been late in issuing the recall. The decision to pull their products from shelves came months after officials had received warnings from doctors who suspected a link between patients suffering skin blotches and the firm's products. The company – whose brands include Blanchir Superior and Sensai – failed to take early measures and was "obsessed with the idea that the skin discolouration was a disease", said Hideki Nakagome, a lawyer who is heading the probe. Kanebo's image "has nose-dived to rock bottom", said Yasuko Kono, secretary-general of Consumers Japan. Underscoring the challenges that lie ahead, 51-year-old Mikako Ando said she was relieved at her own brand choices. "I feel lucky that I don't use Kanebo's products," she said as she strolled in Tokyo's fashionable Ginza district. Communicating through social media such as Twitter and Facebook is another important way to get the company's message out as it works its way through a crisis, said Rachel Catanach, senior partner and managing director at FleishmanHillard Hong Kong. A poorly handled product recall can have a "significant long-term impact" on a brand, she added. "Too often companies wait until they have full information, which is too late in a world of citizen journalists who can release their photo or tell their story via Twitter or other social channels within seconds of it happening," Catanach added. "Every minute that goes by without an effective crisis response exponentially increases the risk to a company's reputation." Toyota, now the world's biggest automaker, "learned reputational lessons the hard way", she said, after it took a huge hit following massive safety recalls in recent years. "Toyota went to great lengths to rebuild its reputation," Catanach said. "Because of this, the Toyota brand has not sustained damage over the longer term." Kanebo, which counts Japan's Shiseido among its rivals and sells its products in more than 50 countries, has seen retail sales plunge about 20% since the recall in July. Millions of affected products were removed from store shelves in Japan, Britain and 10 Asian markets including South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Kanebo's parent company, Kao, said it would book a loss of about $56 million over compensation costs as its share price dived. Toshiyuki Kanayama, senior market analyst for Monex Securities, called on Kao to get more involved in the unit's day-to-day operations to avoid a repeat. "Brand image is important for any business, but it's all the more important in the cosmetics industry," he said. - AFP, September 15, 2013. |
| The cassette tape: Reeling in the years Posted: 14 Sep 2013 06:51 PM PDT It is hard to believe that the audio cassette tape is celebrating its 50th birthday or that without it, the world could have been robbed of some of the most important and influential albums of the 20th century. Everything from The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction to the whole of Nirvana's seminal Nevermind album came into being because of audio cassette recording, and the little object's abundance and flexibility made it as crucial to creating demos and snagging a recording contract as digital recording, MP3 files, the iTunes Store and pre-installed mixing software are today. As well as making the creation of music affordable enough for Post-Punk and New Wave bands to emerge in the UK and the US at a time when unemployment was rife and the future seemed bleak, their portability and ease of use led to the creation of another icon – the Sony Walkman. The first personal stereo also celebrated its 34th birthday this year and, like the cassette itself, is still in production. Building tracklists on Spotify or YouTube or burning a CD for a long family car journey are simply an evolution of the humble mixtape that allowed young couples of the 1970s, '80s and '90s to flirt and which took hip-hop out of the yard party and ghettos and into the clubs. But as well as music, the cassette was the forerunner of the floppy disk and provided the gateway for a whole generation of software designers and computer games developers to demonstrate their creativity and kick-start the market for personal computer and, later for games consoles Even today, when the devices, formats and ways of behaviour it has spawned should have consigned it to the technological graveyard and to a plot alongside the Betamax, the Mini Disc and the eight-track cartridge, the cassette is somehow holding on. In the US there is a growing number of underground and "edgy" recording labels that release music exclusively on cassette. And even Universal, one of the world's largest labels has been dabbling in cassette releases. It recently released a limited run of 4,000 cassette copies of celebrity poetry album Words for You, exclusively for the UK market. And of course, for amorous couples the only way to show a significant other how much they mean is to actually sit down and physically curate and record every moment of a mixtape on a tape. Anyone can put a track list together in iTunes and click "Burn a CD". A brief history 1968 1976 1979 In the same year, Tascam launches the first four-track and eight-track tape-based recorders for home-studio use. 1982 1993 2001 - AFP/Relaxnews, September 15, 2013. |
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