New to the Media Industry: Product Recalls

Recalls happen all the time. Whether voluntary or involuntary, companies frequently call back defective product. In the worst cases, this results in gobs of lost income and bad will toward the brand. In other cases, the brand gets heralded for being proactive.

Last week, Amazon – in essence – recalled books from the Kindle. A publisher had uploaded content to the Kindle store that they didn’t own the copyright to. People bought the content (assuming it was legally available) and downloaded it to their Kindle. When Amazon discovered this, they performed a seamless (if abrupt) recall: they deleted the content off Kindles that had it and returned the money to the customers.

As you would expect, there’s been some backlash to this and we’ll be the last to say what Amazon did was the perfect solution.

But there is a definite silver lining here. Let’s suppose, for instance, that you needed to recall your magazine. In print, that would be crazy expensive at best, impossible at worst. But in this case, Amazon was able to do it, simply and quickly. And while a product recall would never be good for your business, Amazon at least demonstrated a way to minimize the pain. Given the current economic realities in place, that’s not the worst thing in the world.