How companies rebuild trust

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“That’s a big bite for a Big Arch,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said after taking what looked more like a mouse-sized nibble than a real bite of the chain’s new burger. 

The clip was intended to promote McDonald’s new Big Arch sandwich, but instead became an overnight internet punching bag.

Many viewers came away with the same impression: Kempczinski didn’t look like someone who enjoys McDonald’s food. It was less about the size of the bite and more about authenticity. He looked like he was pretending to like it, and not too convincingly.

Rival Burger King responded quickly, posting a video of its president being filmed taking a massive bite of the revamped Whopper, which debuted the same week as the Big Arch. The contrast was obvious. Viewers concluded he actually wanted to eat it.

There may not be lasting consequences for McDonald’s market share, but there was a short-term business impact. According to Placer.ai data reported by The New York Post, weekly visits to Burger King locations were up 7.4% compared with the same period a year earlier. Burger King traffic then grew 5.4%, 2.2%, and 3.2% over the next three weeks. McDonald’s traffic declined over the same period.

Investors seemed to notice. McDonald’s stock fell 7.4%, while shares of Burger King parent company Restaurant Brands $QSR rose 4.9%.

This situation with McDonald’s is pretty low-stakes, all things considered.

There are much higher-stakes crisis PR scenarios for business leaders to consider and contend with, but the theme will always be the same, no matter the situation. Like any meaningful relationship involving people, it always comes down to trust. 

The new rules of corporate reckoning

The old corporate playbook — deny, delay, defend — no longer works, and it often deepens public anger.

Consider more serious, high-profile scandals. 

The collapse of energy giant Enron. Dow Chemical produced napalm and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Facebook $META provided user data to Cambridge Analytica without user consent for political targeting. Volkswagen’s diesel admissions scandal. Bayer, a German pharmaceutical and agricultural subsidiary of IG Farben, operated factories at Auschwitz, using concentration camp prisoners as forced labor during World War II.

Sarah Federman, a conflict resolution professor at the University of San Diego, said that companies often make their problems worse not because of what happened in the past, but because of how they’re responding in the present.

“Business leaders avoid addressing historical transgressions mostly for pragmatic rather than moral reasons,” said Federman, the author of several books, including the forthcoming Corporate Reckoning: How Businesses Can Address Historical Wrong, 

 “A lot of initial responses are motivated by shame or fear of loss of money or reputation,” she said. “While understandable, responding from fear or shame can make things worse for the company. When the strategy is about defending — it’s about yourself rather than on addressing the harm. I’m encouraging a more restorative approach in which we step back and say, ‘1, What happened? 2, What’s the harm that’s still festering? 3, How can we help make things better?’”

Lying about, distorting, or destroying information to avoid the work of reckoning puts corporate reputations unnecessarily at risk, Federman said, citing tobacco industry cover-ups as an example.

“Stalling through legal action also risks the corporate leaders responsible further linking themselves to the harm the actions had caused to begin with,” Federman said. “These tactics tend to backfire, tying corporations and their executives to past harms in ways that didn’t exist, or weren’t in the public eye, before their efforts to avoid responsibility.”

Effective apologies and trust restoration

Companies often treat public backlash as a communications problem when it’s really a trust problem that has finally become visible, said Ken Herron, co-founder of VCONify.

Organizations often make the mistake of trying to manage perception rather than repair trust, Herron said.

“What makes a corporate apology believable is specificity,” he said. “What happened. Why it matters. What the company is changing. Who is accountable. What progress will be visible from the outside. 

“Vague language about values or listening usually makes things worse because it feels designed to absorb pressure rather than address the cause,” Herron added.

“You can’t out-strategize a lack of accountability,” said Anneliese Place, founder of Rock ‘n’ Roll Highway, a nonprofit that preserves the history of music by documenting and mapping historic music landmarks. “People feel it immediately. You don’t rebuild trust by explaining. You rebuild it by owning.”

‘That happened before we got here’

Executives sometimes believe they shouldn’t have to answer for the sins of prior company leaders. That argument fails any time the harm still exists, Federman said.

“If people are still angry, the harm hasn’t been addressed,” she said. “Remember that just because people may physically survive whatever the company did doesn’t mean they’re okay.”

With regard to the “it happened before I got here” argument, executives don’t seem to mind inheriting successful brand images or great product lines, Federman said. 

“You inherit the benefit of a brand that was built before you came, you just also inherit the dark chapters too. It’s like being a citizen of a country, you inherit it all,” she said. “When we acknowledge the historical suffering and wrongdoing done to a group in the past, we can decrease bias against their descendants in the present. When we acknowledge what contributes to contemporary suffering, we can do a better job of restoring their dignity and place in society.”

Reckoning is not about punishment. It’s about repair. New leaders are often asked to fix broken teams, failed products, and toxic cultures. Past moral harms can be treated similarly.

Younger employees especially expect values to be demonstrated, not simply written in the company handbook.

“Employees under age 30 and members of the general public want to see values being practiced,” said Sira Masetti, a corporate performance coach. “By responding honestly, empathetically and consistently with the values your organization represents, CEOs are able to establish trust with customers and the public at large, rather than continually fostering distrust.”

What real corporate reckoning looks like

The companies that navigate backlash most effectively aren’t necessarily the one making the fewest mistakes, Federman said, but rather the ones willing to ask a more difficult question: “What do we owe?”

Executives often fear that acknowledging a past wrong can create an endless cycle of apology and liability, Federman said, but her research suggests the opposite.

“I don’t know of any company that suffered more from reckoning work,” she said. “When companies avoid the work once called out, it’s hard to see them as distinct from the predecessors who participated in the harms.”