Target apologized yesterday evening for a children's Halloween costume — a hooded bodysuit whose exaggerated painted smile critics said read as blackface caricature. Callaway also issued an apology this morning for an ad it approved in partnership with Good Good Golf, depicting a male golfer shoulder-checking a woman to the ground. Both events resulted in significant public backlash.
These public failures of companies like Target and Callaway beg the question — at companies this large, with such thorough approval processes, how do marketing mistakes like this happen? And why, throughout all those internal processes, did nobody express concern? In both cases, dozens of different people likely reviewed each ad, and nobody stopped it.
I spent thirteen years in HR, and I've watched this from inside the room. There are a couple of things that stand out about why people may not have expressed concerns about either of these ads.
The first is diffusion of responsibility — a concept I learned studying Psychology in school and didn't realize how much it would resonate with me professionally. I learned about it when studying the bystander effect. Essentially, people feel less individual burden to act in situations when there are more people involved who could potentially act.
The more approvers you add, the less personally accountable any one of them feels. I worked in a matrixed environment with multiple approvals required on everything. This felt like dysfunction in practice — no personal ownership, no follow-through on questions, and approvals that arrived about a month too late. When twelve people sign off, nobody believes the outcome belongs to them, and everyone figures that if there was anything glaringly wrong, someone else would have caught it.
The second is the belief that nothing will be done, and I've been in this spot specifically. I remember at one point in my career, my client group was a group of support staff and offshore partners who were routinely called “back office” employees. They took offense to this phrasing, feeling like it minimized their contributions. Months later, when I supported a different function, there were regular references made to “back office” teams. I raised this to my leader, making sure she was aware of how frontline employees felt about the term. She said she would mention it, but ultimately the phrasing stuck.
Honestly, at this point, I did stop raising the issue. What I learned was that their feelings were not an important consideration, and neither was my opinion. I stopped raising my hand because I knew I wasn't going to change the outcome.
It would be easy to call this a big-company problem.
Target has thousands of employees and a merchandising process with more checkpoints in it than most businesses have people. Callaway is a multibillion-dollar company. Surely the failure is buried somewhere in a very complicated process.
In my experience, it isn't about the complexity. I've seen breakdowns exactly like this on small working teams — a handful of people, no layers, everyone sitting in the same meeting — any time accountability wasn't clear. A complicated process and large teams don't cause this problem, but they create an environment where these problems are easy to hide.
Two people who own a shop together fail the same way. Each one assumes the other one looked at it. Neither is being careless — each is making the most reasonable assumption available to them, which is precisely why neither of them feels the gap. That's the same failure Target had, with two people instead of two hundred. The number of approvers was never the variable. Whether one of them owned it is.
And the blind spot is getting bigger.
On this topic, I'm hearing a lot of people talk about representation at large companies. From my experience, being in the room wasn't enough — I was the person who noticed. I said the thing out loud, more than once, to the person whose job it was to hear it. It changed nothing — and not because I wasn't there. It changed nothing because nobody owed me an answer. Being consulted and being heard are two different things, and the difference between them is whether somebody is accountable for responding to you.
None of that is an argument for fewer people at the table. Look at which direction we are already heading. New Black directors are 4% of S&P 500 board appointments, down about half in a decade. Women of color hold 21% of entry-level roles and only 9% of VP roles. Nobody can say for sure that Target cut the specific person who would have caught that costume. However, it seems like a clear probability question — when you reduce the number of people who would see it differently, you increase the odds that nobody sees it at all.
Here is how I'd put the two together. When you drive, you check your blind spot. Not because you're a bad driver, but because the mirror can't show you everything, and if you don't turn your head, you put everyone in the car in danger.
A company that hasn't made seeking out another perspective a required step on every deliverable and every product is changing lanes without looking. That's the accountability problem, and it's fixable with a stakeholder analysis. The harder part is the second one: through their own choices, the blind spot those companies aren't checking is getting bigger.
What to do Monday morning.
Take the biggest thing your business is working on right now. The fall campaign, the hiring push, the second location — whatever is going to take up your next quarter.
Spend a few minutes on a stakeholder analysis. Who touches this? Who has to live with it after it's out? Who is going to get asked about it by a customer or an employee, and who never got asked at all? Then name your one accountable person. Not the team. Not leadership. One name.
If you can't name one, that's your most important issue. If the answer is everyone, the answer is no one.