A battery of negative charges has often powered a positive image building blitz

Following its product advisory on defective Matsushita batteries, Nokia has received 26 lakh battery change requests from users in India. The company has been rudely surprised by the way Nokia cell phones are being treated as pocket dynamite. Says the company’s marketing head Devinder Kishore: “Barely 100 cases of battery malfunctioning were tracked by the company over a period of one year. None of these were in India. The bleakest and worst possible scenario is the battery getting slightly dislodged on overcharging. There is simply no chance of any injury to the user. We had issued a product advisory to our customers all over the world but the reaction in other countries, where the authorities and media have apprised people of the true picture, has been much more measured.”

Six per cent battery change requests from Indian users belong to the concerned category (BL-5C). “We are dispatching replacements immediately through couriers at the complainants’ home addresses,” says Kishore. Nokia, which accounts for 73 per cent of the Indian GSM market, says it knows that the chances of damage are negligible but has made the information public “to ensure transparency”. Corporate history suggest that firms that have owned responsibility for product flaws have benefited in the long-run. Those who have ignored or denied it have suffered embarrassments and losses.

It has never been proven that use of Firestone tires in Ford SUVs led to 500 accidents in America. But Ford’s continuous denials led to an embarrassing chain of events, which caused a public perception decline and the eventual ouster of CEO Jacques Naseer in 2000. General Motors had to face public disapproval when Ralph Nader claimed in his 1966 book Unsafe At Any Speed that the company had ignored “an obvious defect in the Chevrolet Corvair”.

When a firm has recalled a defective product, the goodwill has often increased. A case here is that of Tylenol, where the adulteration of some capsules in Chicago, led to seven deaths. Though the authorities and the media said that makers Johnson and Johnson (J&J) were not responsible, it recalled every single bottle of Tylenol from the market, incurring a $100 million loss. Tylenol’s share in the analgesic market plummeted immediately from 35 per cent to 8 per cent, but J&J regained its pre-eminence in a year. The case firmly entrenched its reputation as a consumer-friendly company. It also led to a bigger change — sealed tamper-resistant packaging for most Over The Counter (OTC) consumer products. Kishore feels that the current battery “storm around Nokia (which is well aware of the J&J case) would eventually enhance people’s awareness about the dangers of counterfeit batteries”.