Taking the rap

Companies can learn a lot from governments, one of whose prime tasks is to take the blame for everything whether it’s their fault or not. While they take the credit for all good things they never admit to failure, in flagrant disregard of perfectly obvious facts. But we shouldn’t mind, because we’re going to blame them anyway.

While this is unfair, it's part of the social contract and based on fairly recent history: when “we” needed more data on the effects of nuclear weapons British armed forces were subjected to some of the quickest suntans in history; to test our chemical arsenal, taxpayers who thought they were volunteering to help find a cure for the common cold got something way beyond the healing power of Vick’s Vapour Rub or even prayer.

It's this kind of skulduggery that prevents us from buying Christmas presents for our leaders, or inviting them to baby-sit.

But until very recently we haven’t expected admissions of guilt or apologies. British Lite Culture is changing this – everyone’s a victim and the witch hunt has moved into the commercial world.

While governments can hide behind the social contract, what prevents companies from taking the rap – and they are blamed for everything from obesity to climate change and poverty – are lawyers.

Unfortunately they take it too far, so when corporate spokespeople confront the microphones and cameras their media training kicks in and they start to sound insincere, like government ministers. Speaking like Daleks from tortuous prepared scripts they haemorrhage brand equity from line one. And this is a shame because, as it happens, apologising comes naturally to the British.

Of course there's a catch: we’re happy to apologise profusely for anything, as long as it either doesn't matter or isn’t our fault. So our government is sorry about the rain, the cricket, slavery, the Irish potato famine, the extinction of Neanderthals and the species implosion at the end of the Ordovician, but not about taxation. And not (yet) about Dresden.

Companies do better when they recognise that when their spokesperson speaks, we see a person. When individuals own up, take the rap and apologise we admire them for it, and trust them more. Which companies don’t want that?

As far as the Neanderthals are concerned, they took the arrival of our Cro-Magnon forebears on the chin, in the neck and probably elsewhere, until one of them looked around and thought bugger it – I'm the last one. They were genuine victims, but with no government to blame they had it coming.