Striking A Win-Win Balance Through Corporate Damage Control

Corporate Deception

Hello #qccommunity, Happy weekend. I trust your day is going well. I smiled while reading this theme. This is because I have worked in different cadres and departments of the organisation, as a customer service rep and as a member of the management team. Therefore, have tasted the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of this caption “Corporate Deception”. But the honest feedback I have here is simple:” he who holds the piper dictates the tune.”

Walls.io

Corporate deception could be defined as a damage control strategy. No corporate entity can own up to anything like corporate deception.

However, sometimes, a company may have product defects during production. To avoid incurring further losses from that defect, the production, branding, and marketing teams will present a strategy that will enable them to sell those products. That strategy will present those products with sellable features that will hide those defects.
Furthermore, there will be a knowledge check to repackage those products and present them to the market so that the defects will not be noticeable.

For example, I recently bought a rechargeable fan. It was supposed to come with a mosquito repellent as indicated on the package; unfortunately, it was not the case. When I got home and read through the functions indicated in the manual, I noticed that the repellent was not included in the package. I reached out to the retailer, and after explaining the defects, she transferred my call to the customer care unit, where I was told that the repellent feature was in the promo package for fans. Unfortunately, the promo has ended, and the feature is no longer included.

Geralt
At that point, I got confused, reached out to the manual, and read it to the hearing of the customer care personnel, who subtly insisted and politely gave me an option to upgrade to a higher and costlier brand if I wanted that feature, subtly insisting that the repellent feature only appeared on the brand I bought as a promo package.

At that juncture, I gave up and stuck with the one I bought since I can spray insecticide when I need it. There are other examples where some companies present a false narrative of a lack of funds to avoid high operational costs. Sometimes, too, I see this kind of scenario as a diplomatic way of managing resources and organisational prowess.

The most common corporate deception, so to speak, is this product defect. It can lead to legal battles between companies and customers. It can also cause anger, leading to disloyalty and massive loss of customers to competitors. This is because it often happens as a production error, and if not well managed, the production manager and other staff will pay for the defects; hence, to manage the situation and reduce the cost for the management and production teams.

They devise this corporate deception as an undercover tactic to reduce losses. After all, prevention is better than a cure.

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