Ian M Rountree

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Boneheaded Business Blunders

August 3, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

RadioShack is becoming The Shack. Seriously? By choice? What are they thinking?

When Circuit City bought InterTan Canada, and RadioShack forced its Canadian arm – no longer owned by them – to rebrand itself, it became The Source by Circuit City. CC is gone now, and TSbCC is now just The Source, now owned by Bell Canada. It took nearly four years to whittle out the old RadioShack management paradigms and devalue much of the product so that The Source could opperate as a higher-end boutique rather than the bits-and-pieces store it was known for being. Already, in the blognews comments there are worries over where our friends in America will be able to find their soldering irons and Cat5e connecters if The Shack rebrands itself too thoroughly, too fast. They need to be careful doing this, but seeing as the whole thing just ambushed the public, I have a sneaking suspicion they won’t take the four years The Source did to change their stream. Boneheaded.

Even better, Apple – the head honchos of gadget PR – have managed to get themselves into a bind over a gag order they tried to place on a father and daughter after the poor girl’s iPod battery exploded.

Why bother? Lithium Ion batteries have issues. We know this. Apple, clearly, knows this. Sony, of all people, know this very well. Why cover up a story people already know? They’d have been better off replacing the iPod silently, where now there’s flutterings on the web and in the news about less-than-kind service on their part. Did they really need to do this? Boneheaded.

It’s hard to tell whether the media is getting more thorough, or if companies are just getting worse and worse advice. Is this some kind of attempt at lowering the bar so that what used to be good service is now stand-out-excellent?

So many missed opportunities to do wonderful things, at such massive legal expense, sometimes it’s hard to keep up.

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Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: branding, business choices, shopping

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