Playing With Trust And Confidence

Trust and confidence are hard to earn but easy to lose.

July 15, 2010 - I tweeted a little while ago about a hardware manufacturer hiding behind others to cover a flawed product. Everybody's 'antenna' went up on news about this company. Don't get me wrong. I have huge respect for the Research and Development team in such world class corporations. They hire nothing short of the best in class talent. This particular company just came from behind with awesome R&D excellence and swept the market through sheer product quality, differentiation and innovative features.

I originally wanted to title this post as 'the rigor of product development'. I was pondering between 'rigor' and 'curse for a few minutes before arriving at the current title. A simple oversight during product design or development can cause a huge market impact and have potential for immense erosion in customer confidence. Remember what happened recently to the car gaint - Toyota. Product development teams are well aware of the risk and are always on their toes. There is enough and more design validation. On top of it the product is throughly tested using world class methods. A product company should be doubly careful here when they try to skim the market by just leveraging on brand power.

What is interesting to watch is the fact that success makes it difficult for a corporation to simply admit a design mistake as a mistake. In fact such a simple gesture will actually have potential to increase customer confidence and trust exponentially. Everything else done by this company is the right behaviour. For example, the CEO himself telling his customers a work around for the problem is warranted. However, trying to hide behind some technical jargon or the capacity of another eco-system player is what is difficult to digest.