For most organizations, the news that the company inadvertently sent a cannonball careening out of the safe confines of the firing range and through a private home would be a nightmare. Most organizations aren’t Mythbusters. For this wildly popular Discovery Channel show, a ballistic blunder could prove to be a priceless branding opportunity.
Thankfully, no one was injured in the incident. (This statement doesn’t include, of course, Mythbuster’s relationship with their insurance company!) Accidents and mishaps are inevitable in some businesses; productions that regularly do things like test urban legends with high-powered explosives fall squarely into that category.
Almost every episode of the show features a segment where the testing went wrong. If you’re a Mythbusters Brand Lover (one of the legions of ardent fans who never miss an episode, buy Mythbusters merchandise, and participate in online discussion forums, nitpicking every experiment within minutes of its airing), you understand that failure is inherent in the discovery process.
And what a magnificent failure this was! There’s a almost cinematic element to the incident: it’s not hard to visualize the cannon firing; the cannon ball going up, higher than anyone expected; fear and panic rising as the ball went out of sight; the relief upon discovering no one was injured. It’s the ultimate, ramped-up version of the show—a version that no viewer would even know to ask for, because who would believe it possible?
Brand Modeling: Understanding Peak Experiences
Emotional expectations shape the relationship between our customers and our brand. If we meet or exceed those expectations, the relationship becomes stronger. If we fail in those expectations, the relationship is damaged. A big part of those expectations is what we call the Peak Experience: what is the ultimate emotional state the consumer expects to experience after engaging with us?
If we were to speculate about Mythbuster’s Brand Lovers, we’d guess that their Peak Experience has a lot to do with excitement and intellectual curiosity. These are people who want the answer to the question, “What would happen if…” Mythbusters has built their relationship with their Brand Lovers by consistently answering that question in an exciting way, steadily ramping the size and scope of the experiments up to satisfy viewer curiosity. This is the team that used a jet engine to flip a school bus.
With a single incident, every bit of emotional payoff Mythbusters Brand Lovers receive from watching the show was just delivered in a super size version. This was the ultimate answer to “What if…?” Slipping free from safety’s bounds showed us what Mythbusters could be, in a world absent consequences.
The Discovery Channel needs to be smart and strategic about how they handle this incident. Of course, there must be an acknowledgment of the safety issue and appropriate compensation to the homeowner who wasn’t planning to have two-cannonball shaped holes installed in their house. At the same time, it’s essential that the sense of gleeful exuberance that comes with discovery (even in the wake of destruction) comes through.
Mythbusters had a catastrophic systems failure, but they failed doing what their Brand Lovers expect them to do, in the way their Brand Lovers expect them to do it. There’s messing up, and there’s messing up magnificently. Mythbusters has the opportunity to showcase the difference.