It occurred to me recently that we are all just trying to have a nice life, build a good business, and make enough bucks to be comfortable. Most of us try to do good things for the communities we work in. But sometimes what we attempt to do doesn’t always work out because we make mistakes, or worse, it all goes out of control through no fault of our own.
A good example of this is the recent concern over the cleanliness of play areas in restaurants. Now, McDonald’s Playlands were an innovation originally meant to provide some added entertainment for our kid customers, and let mom and dad have a moment of peace for their meal.
At McDonald’s, we began to see problems when the more legally oriented customers saw an opportunity to sue us when their precious kids decided to try to fly off the top of the slide. Kids didn’t have paratrooper training and didn’t know how to land. So a good thing, playlands, became a bad thing for the store’s public-relations department.
Unfortunately, the relatively few playlands left have developed yet another problem: how to keep them sanitized. Now, my wife and I live with two horses and a dog, which almost never bring germs home from school. But our nephew does.
When he comes over and sniffles, we know what is going to happen to us. And so does the playland owner. There has to be a plan in each store to keep the equipment clean.
But there wasn’t in this case, and the McDonald’s PR team was forced to deal with another unforeseen problem.
In my experience, there were some good PR programs that developed problems no one could have foreseen. But there were also some programs that proved to be better than we expected.