A Few Bad Apples

Not all disasters endanger facilities, assets, data or staff -- some can just destroy your hard-won reputation in the eyes of your customers. That’s the message business owners should carry away after viewing a new short documentary film by Casey and Van Neistat, two brothers who became irritated with a flaw in the new Apple iPod MP3 player they’d bought.

According to the Neistat brothers’ film iPod’s Dirty Secret, their $400 iPod, a device that was recently declared Invention of the Year by Time magazine, was rendered useless when the internal rechargeable battery died. Apple, which didn’t sell replacement batteries, told the brothers the repairs would cost hundreds and tersely advised them to simply go out and buy another unit. Irritated, the pair took their case to the court of public opinion through a guerrilla marketing campaign built around their film, a supporting Web site www.ipodsdirtysecret.com and simple word of mouth. To date, the site has attracted more than half a million visitors. Apple responded in Sept. 2003 with a battery replacement program but only after hundreds of thousands of viewers had hit the site. While the Neistat brothers are pleased with Apple’s new policy, the entire episode serves as a valuable lesson about the danger of alienating even one customer in the Internet era.