Over the past year, brand apologies have become their own genre of content. Something goes wrong, a campaign gets pulled, customers get angry, screenshots circulate, and eventually a brand publishes a statement explaining what happened, acknowledging the criticism, and promising to do better.
We’ve seen enough of these apologies to recognize the formula. But just because a brand follows the formula doesn’t mean the apology will actually work, and over the past two weeks, four examples involving Neutrogena, Target, Good Good Golf, and Callaway have given us plenty to dissect.
Because when a brand apology is done well, it does more than calm the backlash. It shows that the company understands what went wrong and has a plan to change it.
Want the full context behind these examples? Watch this week’s episode of The Daily Carnage Show to hear Shannon Sankey break down what separates a credible brand apology from corporate damage control — and why some apologies can end up causing even more damage.
Neutrogena: When the Apology Comes Too Late
Neutrogena’s response has probably generated the most criticism of the four.
After actress Hayden Panettiere died on August 16, an interview she gave earlier this year began circulating again. In the interview, she explained that she believed Neutrogena had tried to end their long-term relationship after she publicly discussed her experience with severe postpartum depression.
Panettiere had worked with Neutrogena for about a decade. She said that after speaking about her experience, she learned the company wanted to drop her. Her representative ultimately intervened, but when the partnership later expired, it was not renewed.
Panettiere said she was hurt that she never heard from the team she had worked with for much of her adult life.
Her comments were discussed in a May appearance on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, as well as in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning.
Neutrogena responded four days after Panettiere’s death. The company said it was deeply saddened by her passing and acknowledged that it had made her feel unsupported during a difficult time.
The brand also announced that it would make a significant investment in a longstanding community health partner to expand access to support, including care for postpartum depression.
Neutrogena’s full statement can be read here.
But the response created almost as many questions as it answered. For one, four days is a long time when you’re dealing with an online crisis, particularly when it involves a former ambassador who has died. Then there was the wording. Saying someone “felt unsupported” isn’t necessarily wrong, but it can sound a lot like “sorry you felt that way.” There wasn’t much heart or soul in the response.
And then Neutrogena disabled comments on Instagram. Obviously, there are reasons brands might disable comments during a crisis, but in a public online forum, that action can send a very simple message to consumers: We don’t really care what you have to say about this. It doesn’t stop the conversation, either. People simply take it somewhere else. In this case, that included calls for a boycott.
There’s also an unresolved question around the investment Neutrogena announced. The company said it would provide more details once its plans were in place, but those details had not yet been released. And when you’re talking about a mea culpa, consumers need to know where the money is going and what the program will actually accomplish if the gesture is going to have any credibility.
Technically, Neutrogena hit all the elements of the brand apology genre: there was acknowledgment, regret, and a promise of action. But none of those elements felt particularly strong or sincere. The result? Consumers were unsatisfied. And in this case, the stakes were especially high because the audience was also parasocially grieving a famous person.
Neutrogena, go wash your face, girl.
Target: Speed Can Make a Difference
Next up: Target.
Target recently pulled a Halloween costume after criticism that the design evoked racist imagery, particularly nineteenth-century minstrel imagery.
The costume featured a young Black child modeling a circus clown outfit with Harlequin-style pants, a bowler hat, and an exaggerated toothy smile. Whether or not the design was intentional, the connections to racist minstrel imagery were pretty clear.
Many people working in marketing and packaging design may not be aware of some of these tropes. These images are so deeply embedded in American culture that things like this can still happen.
That isn’t an excuse, though. Professional communicators should be well educated on these issues.
Ultimately, Target removed the product and issued a straightforward apology.
In its official statement, Target said, “We know we got this wrong and we are deeply sorry,” described the costume as offensive, and said it should never have been part of its offerings.
What made Target’s response different was the speed.
The company responded quickly, removing the product immediately after the backlash rather than leaving it online while its team worked on the perfect statement, and that does seem to have helped.
The bigger question Target is left with is: Okay, so you admit it’s offensive. How did this get approved in the first place? That question is a major part of the brand apology conversation.
Most of the time, there isn’t enough infrastructure in place to keep things like this from happening, particularly at a time when DEI itself is shrinking.
So brands often can’t answer the existential question consumers are asking. They promise to do better, but there are rarely specifics around what that actually means for their internal processes.
Good Good Golf and Callaway: Owning the Approval Process
We see that same question with Good Good Golf and Callaway.
The two companies collaborated on a driver, but the online ad created a serious backlash. The video showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark pushing golfer Alexis Miestowski to the ground after she reached for his golf club. Clark then stood over her and told her not to touch his new driver.
The original ad and the resulting backlash were reported by GOLF.com.
Good Good apologized, saying the video depicted actions that were “not aligned with our values as a brand.” The company took down the content and reiterated that it stood for making golf more inclusive.
Callaway also said it was disappointed in the content and hoped to create a more inclusive environment for golfers.
But, in the week since, Good Good Golf’s president was ousted, the company lost its PGA title sponsor position, and its products have been pulled from Dick’s Sporting Goods and Golf Galaxy.
Now, put yourself in the consumer’s shoes.
What you’re hearing is that companies are disappointed in the ad and can’t believe this happened.
The message is essentially: Hey, you know us. We love inclusivity, and consumers are left thinking: Okay, then why did you post an ad that basically needs a trigger warning? That’s where Callaway CEO Chip Brewer’s subsequent apology became important.
Brewer acknowledged that although Good Good produced the video, Callaway had approved it before it was posted — and said that approval should never have happened.
He said the company was taking the matter seriously, apologized for the video, and said it would investigate further. Good Good CEO Matt Kendrick also followed up with a more detailed response, explaining that the video had been intended as a parody, but regardless of intent, he said the company was responsible for the impact.
That’s a much stronger way to apologize.
Kendrick also said the company would change its content-vetting process and that he would personally review marketing content for the foreseeable future. That’s a specific change in company process, paired with transparency around that change.
Both the follow-up responses from Good Good and Callaway were covered by Golf Digest, including Brewer’s acknowledgment that Callaway had approved the video and this is where the difference between a weak apology and a stronger one becomes pretty clear.
Saying “This isn’t aligned with our values” doesn’t explain how the content got approved. Saying “Yeah, we approved this. It never should have happened. We’re going to put processes in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again” does.
The latter identifies a failure in the process and points toward a specific corrective action. That transparent, specific, concrete corrective action is one of the things that makes a brand apology more credible.
The Three Questions Every Brand Apology Should Answer
A brand apology isn’t just a statement designed to respond to audience reaction, soothe the situation, calm the backlash, or disable the comments. It’s a statement about behavior and how to change it. That’s the most important thing to understand about the brand apology as a genre.
A good one answers three questions:
What happened?
What did we do wrong?
What are we changing?
The first question is usually pretty easy. The internet tends to answer that one for you. The second is harder. This is where brands often fall back on phrases like “We missed the mark,” “We’re listening to the feedback,” or “This is not who we are.”
These phrases aren’t necessarily wrong, but they’re often too general to mean much to anyone. The public isn’t dumb. There was a creative brief, there were people involved, there was a production, and there was an approval process — often several. There may have been executives and agencies involved. Something happened inside that system that allowed the mistake to make it into the world.
That’s why the third question — What are we going to do to change it? — becomes so important. A brand apology is more credible when there’s a real consequence attached to it. Maybe you’re removing the product, pulling the ads, or allocating time to change your approval process. Maybe you’re conducting a postmortem, investigating what happened, revising policies, or even publishing the results of the investigation. Or maybe you’re following through on a donation or partnership.
None of these things guarantee that consumers will forgive the brand. Make no mistake: you’ll have a shorter leash after the first one. But they do give the apology something concrete behind it.
The Apology Is Only the Beginning
All of this matters because brands increasingly have to apologize in public. Marketing is now scrutinized by customers, employees, creators, journalists, and entire online communities before a campaign has even run its course. That makes brand apologies an important part of your internal toolkit.
Unfortunately, consumers aren’t getting better at accepting them. If anything, they’re getting better at recognizing the patterns behind them. That’s why the brand apology has become a genre. Consumers know that “we take this feedback seriously” can sometimes mean “shit, everything’s on fire.”
The best apologies are simple. They don’t need to be overly emotional or three pages long in a Notes app. They just need to be specific: acknowledge the actual problem, take responsibility for your role in creating it, and tell people what happens next. Ultimately, consumers — and history itself — are going to judge the apology less by how well it was written and more by what the company does after it’s published.
The apology is just the beginning.
That’s the lesson. The brand apology is not the response itself. It’s the first step toward showing what the company is actually going to do differently.
