A Retailer’s Checklist to Prevent the Next Target Costume Blunder

In 2020, Target pulled a children's costume from its website after shoppers pointed out that it evoked Anne Frank. Six years later, the retailer is apologizing again, this time for a children's Halloween costume that critics said evoked racist minstrel caricatures. Target responded in typical corporate fashion. It pulled the product, apologized, and promised internal reviews of the situation. But we all know that the veil of proactivity fades in favor of waiting for all of the uproar to blow over. When does an apology stop being a checkbox exercise as opposed to a genuine learning moment? A massive corporation like Target no doubt has checks, balances, and stage gates for almost everything. And there’s real volume and pressure behind seasonal innovation. Target has said some of its strongest recent performance has come in the fall, and nearly 70% of its Halloween assortment this year is new. That’s a lot of innovation moving through an organization quickly. One offensive product is a mistake; two is a concerning trend. When a similar failure happens again, it raises a harder question: What did the organization actually learn the first time? The bar is high and teams are stretched thin trying to find ideas that land. Products are tested for risk—things like choking, flammability, sizing, cost. What's too often disconnected is how an individual product might affect perception of the brand. There is no innovation without brand, and no brand without innovation. But the teams tasked with each are often operating separately. So what should retailers do differently? Classify products by their potential for brand risk A costume carries fundamentally different risks than a towel or a blender. Costumes regularly venture into the territory of culture, identity and at times, appropriation. In a Talker Research survey of American parents, 29% said costumes built around cultural stereotypes should be pulled from stores. For anything involving blackface, that number rose to 43%. Some lines are clearer than others. Seasonal deadlines make that scrutiny harder, but also more important. Review the whole, not just the parts Teams need to look at the composite, not just the individual components. In the Target example, a children’s striped bodysuit alone reads as a clown suit. Add a black mesh mask with a snaggletoothed grin. Then add black gloves and a tiny top hat with a flower on the brim. Most companies review the tech pack and never review the photograph of the image, but the photograph is what the customer ultimately sees, and reacts to. Look closely at consumer signals Before this conversation exploded on social media, shoppers were already flagging the costume in Target's own product reviews. That's the kind of signal companies spend enormous amounts of money trying to find. Another problem is often that the people moderating product reviews don't talk to the people creating products, and most of those folks are not getting feedback directly from consumers whatsoever. In a hundred-thousand-person company, things fall through the cracks. Consumer research only helps if it can travel horizontally across the organization, and can be accessed quickly enough for every employee making a decision that affects the brand to act on it. At many companies, access to consumer testing is not yet democratized and widely available. Address the cultural problems no checklist can solve. No one wakes up hoping to destroy brand equity and alienate consumers. Companies repeat mistakes when they treat their own response as a project with an end date instead of a system that has to be built and maintained for the long term. Think about what six years does to an organization the size of Target. The team that felt the heat in 2020 is gone. The vp that commissioned the internal review may have retired. The consultant that curated the design invoiced and moved on. The task force fizzled out not long after the news cycle. And the document with the retro is still sitting in a drive nobody opens under a name that no longer has any relevance. That requires better consumer feedback and more connected data. But no amount of testing can make up for one cold, hard fact. Somebody who could have looked at this costume and immediately seen the problem was either not involved, or wasn't heard early enough to stop it. Target will recover, and eventually the news cycle will move on, as it goes. But while consumers can look past a mistake, it’s very hard to undo how a brand made them feel. The goal shouldn’t be to get better at apologizing. It's to build an organization that remembers why it had to apologize in the first place, and keeps the next embarrassing mea culpa from happening.

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A Retailer’s Checklist to Prevent the Next Target Costume Blunder

Target's repeat offense shows why 'pull it and apologize' doesn't work. Here's what retailers should actually change.

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Nataly Kelly

Brand Marketing

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