Brag About Your Retailing Humility

Advertise and publicize how you consider your retail business to be excellent, but not perfect. Say you’re always looking for ways to get even better. If you fail to adequately demonstrate your humility like this, you risk schadenfreude disrupting store profits in the short term and the dreaded doppelganger store brand image doing damage in the longer term.

      Schadenfreude means delighting in the misery of others. That’s one thing happening now to Toyota Motors—and to Toyota dealers by association—in the face of the massive automobile recall. Ford and GM are offering $1,000 bonuses to customers who want to trade in their Toyotas. An MSNBC article about the offer is titled “As Toyota stumbles, schadenfreude lurks: U.S. automakers, long dogged by reliability issues, stand to gain from recall.”

      Psychologists at University of Kentucky say schadenfreude comes from envy. Psychologists at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia say schadenfreude is rooted in resentment. The sort of resentment that can follow Toyota claiming to be the unsurpassable model of quality and then appearing to fail to walk the talk.

      Schadenfreude has even made it into a “The Simpsons” episode where Ned’s business is failing. Homer is overjoyed, and when Lisa defines schadenfreude, Homer replies, “Those Germans have a word for everything.”

      That brings us to doppelganger—from the German and defined as a ghostly counterpart of a living entity. Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison document how Starbucks is suffering from a “doppelganger brand image” in which the company’s branding of the shops as an authentic coffee experience has come around to haunt Starbucks. Many customers after being convinced of the importance of such an experience decided Starbucks was bragging too much about their ability to be authentic. Those customers gave up on Starbucks and aimed for other shops which showed more humility.