• by Karl Greenberg , March 15, 2007

The Home Depot is the latest marketer to offer a mea culpa, with the company's new CEO giving an unusually candid, plain-talking apology to readers of MSN Money yesterday. The apology, by Frank Blake, followed a column by Scott Burns complaining about Home Depot's customer service.

His column lit a fire among readers, hundreds of whom offered their own e-mailed horror stories about long waits, under staffing, poor organization and a paucity of informed and skilled tradespeople at the superstores.

The apology by Blake, who was named to head the Atlanta-based company in January, was published in the Web-based MSN Money.

He said he had read the postings. "There's no way I can express how sorry I am for all of the stories you shared. I recognize that many of you were loyal and dedicated shoppers of The Home Depot ... and we let you down. That's unacceptable."

He says that because of the complaints, he has created a dedicated task force, reporting to him, to resolve the issues raised by Burns and his readers and that the chain is boosting staffing and improving store appearance and customer service. He concludes that if consumers aren't happy, "please let us know ... just like Scott Burns did."

The style of the apology -- personal instead of corporate, folksy instead of imperious and expedient instead of delayed -- is the latest in a trend of apologies striking not only for their frequency of late but for their Truman-esque willingness to take responsibility and say "I'm sorry," a trend that has included apologies from the CEOs of JetBlue, U.S. Yum Brands and ConAgra.

JetBlue CEO David Neeleman responded with a personal statement pledging refunds, travel vouchers and a "Passenger Bill of Rights" after scheduling snafus during a February snowstorm trapped passengers in planes for up to 10 hours. He then appeared on "The Late Show With David Letterman."

After a video showing rats running amok in a New York Taco Bell hit the Web, Emil Brolick, CEO of parent U.S. Yum Brands, apologized in a video that Yum posted on its various Web sites.

Brand consultant Jack Trout, president of Trout & Partners, says the spate of personalized corporate apologies are a trend acknowledging the transparency of the Web (and exploiting it) and Americans' weariness of the Bush Administration's refusal to admit mistakes or to admit them evasively, as Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzalez did yesterday in reference to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. "I acknowledge that mistakes were made here ..."

"I think [marketers] are personalizing these things more because, really, the ultimate person who has to give the public apology has to be the CEO," says Trout. "And I think Americans are looking at public apologies in a different way, especially after the Administration's non-apologies, which kind of sets the tone. Americans are looking for people to step up and say 'I screwed up.' And if you don't step up, people will write about it because silence grants the point. The law of candor says you have to step up and say that was pretty bad and set up the positive: This is what we are going to do to fix it."

Eugene Secunda, adjunct professor of media studies at New York University and principal of Secunda Marketing Communications, concurs, saying the problem is a kind of apology desensitization among various audiences. "If you have heard the same apology being offered again and again, either by corporate leaders or government leaders, you begin to tune it out. The result is that there is more and more of a burden on executives to find another way to restore their credibility. And you only have a good reputation once. The moment you have lost it, you never get back."