There is an old adage in life: don’t let your failures define you. A lot of people are afraid of failure. I suppose that is a natural thing – who likes to fail? However, if you are human, you are going to fail at something sooner or later – and many times for some of us! If you quit trying as soon as you fail, refusing to move beyond your mistakes, they will define you. The difference between people who succeed and those who don’t is the ability to learn from what went wrong, make a correction and move on.

Let me put a business marketing twist to this: if you are going to be in business, you are going to make mistakes along the way. The marketplace can be very harsh and unforgiving of brands that make a mistake. It is the job of marketing to guard the reputation of the brand and to put your best foot forward. What happens when you mess up? In some cases, there is a marketing effort to sweep the mistakes under the rug and hope that no one notices. However, that never works for very long – consumers are too savvy to be fooled. The better way is to acknowledge the mistake, make adjustments and ask forgiveness from your customers. That is easier said than done! I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said, “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” What exactly should you do with your marketing in a case like this?

From a marketing perspective, humbling your brand to say we messed up needs to be a summary, not a three-act play. In other words, I am not sure the public needs to see all your dirty laundry to fix the image problem your brand is left with after a mistake. Fixing the problem should be the main point of your marketing, not the error itself. A few years ago, Domino’s Pizza reinvented its pizza in what was called the Great Pizza Turnaround. They conducted focus groups and people complained about how bad their pizza tasted. They did something most brands would not do: they aired these complaints in their ads. Then they said they had recreated their product with a new recipe. They showed up at the door of people who had criticized their product with new pizzas and recorded their reactions. The critics loved the new recipe. Domino’s sales surged. Note that the marketing didn’t showcase everything that went wrong at Domino’s to make their old pizza taste so bad. They focused on the change and successfully marketed the new recipe.

You might also remember that about the time of the Domino’s Pizza Turnaround, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred. Executives at BP were less than forthcoming about the extent of the disaster, claiming the environmental impact would be modest. It quickly became a publicity nightmare. It cost their CEO his job. There were boycotts of BP gas stations. Eventually, marketing helped BP right the ship with consumers, but it took some effort to admit their mistakes and focus on being environmentally good citizens.

Failures are bound to come upon your business. Mistakes happen. What you do with those mistakes from a marketing perspective will either define your brand as a loser or an overcomer.