Last week, the popular consumer-oriented blog The Consumerist broke a story involving a minor dust-up between electronics retailer Circuit City and MAD Magazine, a publication that’s been lampooning public officials and institutions since the days of black-and-white televisions and rabbit-ear antennae. MAD’s most recent issue featured a four-page spoof ad for a company called “Sucker City,” with a rather familiar-looking red and white logo. Among other things, the ad satirized the scarcity of Wii gaming consoles, the company’s rivalry with Best Buy and the prices on high-end plasma TVs (“Don’t save anything! $4299.99,” it teased).

A less-than-tickled corporate executive fired back, ordering Circuit City stores to destroy all copies of MAD in their possession (evidently, magazines are sold at 40 locations). What would have otherwise been confined to the pages of a humor magazine was now a national story. Only with an added twist: Circuit City can’t take a joke.

“I can’t imagine that anybody could think they could do that and not get coverage,” says Shel Holtz, principal of Holtz Communication + Technology.

Lest the company’s corporate office be perceived as a bunch of thin-skinned curmudgeons, a quick-thinking corporate communicator stepped in the next day with an apology and a refreshingly self-effacing response that could be instructive to others involved in the fine art of reputation management.   

Describing himself as an “embarrassed corporate PR guy,” Jim Babb reportedly wrote The Consumerist to offer contrition for the employee’s “knee-jerk reaction.” (Babb had already sent an apology to MAD and the order to find and destroy magazines had reversed.)

“As a gesture of our apology and deep respect for the folks at MAD Magazine, we are creating a cross-departmental task force to study the importance of humor in the corporate workplace and expect the resulting PowerPoint presentation to top out at least 300 pages, chock full of charts, graphs and company action plans,” the excerpted message reads. (An e-mail sent by Ragan.com to Circuit City was not returned.)

Babb finished with an “offer” for MAD editor John Ficarra: “A $20.00 Circuit City gift card, toward the purchase of a Nintendo Wii ... if he can find one!”

Damage control

The self-deprecating PR practitioner may have recognized a dictum his more reactionary colleague failed to heed: There is almost no defense against satire.

When reporters or editors get facts wrong, corrections can be made, says Norman Birnbach, whose Massachusetts-based PR firm handles a range of high-tech and B2B clients. But when satirists make you a target, it’s best to respond on their terms, with comedy. “One of the things you might do is take out an ad yourself in the next magazine that somehow says ‘we’re in on the joke,’” Birnbach suggests. “You can’t respond with anger or emotion because you’ve already lost at that point.”

Holtz agrees. “You smile and take it with good humor unless there is something flat-out libelous in it. You have to assess whether it’s going to make people laugh or damage your reputation. If the reputational damage is completely inaccurate you have to do something with humor.”

Situations potentially harmful to organizations’ reputations ought to be assessed according to four factors, Birnbach says. These include “What’s being said, what kind of reaction is being generated, where the statement is appearing and who wrote it,” he explains. The importance of each is relative to a given situation.

“In this case, it appeared in MAD Magazine, and I think a lot of people said, ‘Who knew MAD Magazine was still publishing?’” Birnbach says. Had it been in an investor-oriented publication, for example, there may be cause for concern. But even so, that would hardly justify the Circuit City executive’s initial reactionary response, he says.

By calling undue attention to the situation, that employee set what some pundits refer to as the “Streisand Effect” into motion. Wikipedia defines it as a “phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized.” (By suing to have an aerial photo of her house removed from a collection of California coastline photographs, singer and actress Barbra Streisand only worked to ensure its mass-distribution across the Internet).

Fortunately for the electronics retailer, Babb’s damage control was right on the mark. “He apologized. He was self-effacing about it. He was candid,” Holtz says. “He took action to correct the problem and I thought his sense of humor was terrific.”

And apparently it went over well with MAD editor Ficarra. Quoted by Newsarama.com, he says “we at MAD were shocked and confused by the entire incident—mainly because we had no idea that Circuit City even sells magazines. Nonetheless, we accept their apology but hold out hope that their gesture of a $20 gift card is only an opening offer.”