How Amazon Broke Occam’s Razor

The recent PR dust-up regarding Amazon’s delisting and re-tagging of various books (many of them falling in the LGBT lit genres) in their system that then caused those books to be far harder to find – and therefore buy – was a great PR lesson of what not to do (unless your goal is to make a lot of customers angry and create a really, really awful PR mess during a holiday weekend; if so Amazon FTW!).

So, to recount what should be obvious to companies by now:

• When there’s a problem, acknowledge it quickly (even if you don’t have all the answers). People will assume the worst in an info vacuum, so it’s better if you’re participating in the conversation.
• “I’m/we’re sorry” goes a long, long way (even if you weren’t wrong).
• Nothing escapes the Internet, and everything lives forever (well, longer than most executives would like when the PR is negative).

The twitter storm that erupted over the weekend, backed by almost real-time blog posts, demonstrated again that the people most likely to use online services are (shocking!) most likely to actively engage in online conversations. Hey, company executives: you can’t count on days to craft a response, and the Internet is live 24/7/365.

What I find most interesting about this, though, is that almost no one decrying the issue gave Amazon the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, there appears to be evidence that certain titles had been delisted as far back as February, as well as reports of authors being sent notices about Amazon’s “new policy.”

Still, why so much backlash now? And why not wait for Amazon to respond before passing judgement (based solely on speculation) about the actual cause/reason for the listing and tagging changes?

I think the answer has a lot to do with the fact that consumers no longer trust companies or their executives. There isn’t even the option of giving companies the benefit of the doubt. Sadly, companies have given consumers lots of reasons not to them.

Still, when the level of consumers’ distrust practically excludes a balanced/reasoned approach, the consequences are anything but good (for anyone). One responder to a blog post about the delisting and tagging invoked Occam’s razor, asking people to seriously consider if it passed the common sense test for Amazon to do something that would have such an obvious and inflammatory consequence.

The possibility that someone or some people made a mistake or a stupid decision just didn’t even enter into most of the outraged complaints.

It’s still not totally clear what actually happened at Amazon. The company says it was a computer programming “glitch,” but consumers aren’t buying it.

The consequences, however, are all too obvious: thousands of new negative content on the Internet about Amazon, thousands of really irate consumers, and one more example of how much easier it is for companies to make a mis-step (especially online companies).

Trust is hard won and easily lost. But when your customers are already pre-disposed to disbelieve whatever your PR team states, trust may not even be possible (and Occam’s razor may be dulled beyond repair).