Office Max Fails on 'Daughter Killed in Car Crash' Story

We know you heard about this corporate comms nightmare: Gawker, BuzzFeed, Forbes and pretty much every other blog ran stories about the fact that Office Max’s sales department sent a solicitation letter/coupon to a man whose daughter was killed in a crash last year with the recipient listed as “daughter killed in car crash.”

This incident was, of course, a mistake (though we have to wonder why anyone would think to enter that text into a contact database).

The real story here is how Office Max screwed up the damage control response by blaming it on “big data.”

Ray Hennessey, the editor-in-chief who will moderate Entrepreneur‘s upcoming PR panel, explains what the company’s team did wrong:

• It responded to victim Mike Seay‘s customer service call not with an apology but with a “this is not possible” dismissal
• It attempted to absolve itself by blaming the entire incident on its third-party data broker

A...