After graduating from college with a degree in marketing, your first job was working in the marketing department for a fast-food chain located in the southwestern part of the United States. After three years, you were promoted and became director of the chain’s social media program. While monitoring posts about the company on Facebook and Twitter, you notice the following post from one of the firm’s former employees.

“Got fired today, but I was tired of serving low-quality food with expired expiration dates. Don’t eat there or any of the chain’s restaurants unless you want to get deathly ill.” To make matters worse, a couple of other employees who had recently been fired chimed in and made posts of a similar nature.

Assignment

1. Working in small teams, create a response that can be used to convince consumers that your company is committed to food freshness and quality and that these posts were made by employees who had been terminated.

2. Choose a spokesperson who will read your response to the rest of the class.

3. As a class, discuss the pros and cons of each response developed by each team.

4. Ask all members of the class to vote on the best response.

5. Finally, each team should prepare a report for the company’s management that describes what happened and the response that was made to tell the company’s side of this issue and restore consumer confidence in the firm’s food products.