Or like the bumpers at the bowling alley. Just me? Okay…
Just like you need guardrails on the road, you need them for marketing too!
This month, our plug is Heat Up St. Louis! If you would like to donate, please visit their site at https://heatupstlouis.org/
SOURCES
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c33y1ynvjzjo
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/07/i-felt-my-spine-and-body-split-the-woman-who-was-hit-by-a-child-on-a-lime-bike-and-denied-compensation
https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/automotive-cannibalism-failed-deals-a-youtubers-grilling-and-the-perfect-car-fiskers-fall-from-grace-explained
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2025/11/15/baby-formula-botulism-lawsuits-byheart-recall/87292818007/
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/waymo-exec-admits-harsh-truth-about-companys-safety-record
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/waymo-stops-ride-delivers-disorderly-190140307.html
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
So this morning, I was reading a piece in the news about a woman who had her life forever altered when a 10-year-old boy riding an electric bike, or ebike, crashed into her while she was walking in a pedestrian area in central London. Not across a bike lane, not across a street, but along a wide sidewalk. You can actually watch the video of the incident captured through a closed circuit camera nearby, though, trigger warning, it’s absolutely awful to watch a 60-something woman get knocke/d to the ground.
Now, I’ve been Schwinned by a regular bike before back in my college days, and it’s not a fun experience to get hit by someone going 10 miles per hour. You can get really hurt, and both cyclists and pedestrians can require medical attention in those situations.
But a rental ebike from a company like Lime can go anywhere from 15 to 20 miles per hour, and they hit a lot harder, not just because they’re going faster, but also because they’re significantly heavier – about 50-60 pounds, compared to about 20-30 pounds for a regular adult bicycle without a motor.
If you hit someone with something going faster that’s also heavier, you are going to create a lot more force on impact, and in the case of this woman, whose name is Jane Ouartsi, she’s described the impact this way in a piece that showed up in today’s edition of The Guardian:
“It’s hard to remember exactly, but I think I was saying what a lovely lunch, and then all of a sudden there was a horrific impact. I felt my spine and body split and I thought my life was over.”
That was over three years ago, and Jane has since had multiple surgeries due to a fractured collarbone, two spinal fractures and a broken femur. She also had to be taught how to walk again. Her partner who was with her at the time, Dave Mathias, has spent that time trying to convince the ebike rental company Lime to take responsibility for the incident and admit that these bikes could be dangerous when used improperly.
In fact, neither the boy nor Lime have been held accountable in any way, and Lime has not compensated Jane for her injuries, nor has its public liability insurance carrier.
And this is far from the only story about ebikes harming unwary pedestrians. A BBC story I’ve linked in the show notes talks about another case where a woman had teeth knocked out and the Guardian story talks about how the elderly and blind not only have to deal with the bikes whizzing by, by also being strewn around the pavement when riders get tired of them.
Lime currently offers services in 22 of the 32 boroughs of London but is not well-regulated. But there are cities around the world that have banned them and other ebike and electric scooter companies from setting up shop. Our own city of St. Louis banned electric scooters from both Lime and Bird in the city before bringing them back with heavy regulations, and many of the cities in St. Louis County and St. Charles County are currently considering banning or heavily regulating ebikes and escooters.
And in fact, some of the London boroughs themselves are banning dockless ebikes because they consider them a nuisance.
Lime is one of several rental companies often accused of taking a “offer service first, worry about the details later” approach to its services that is very on brand for a tech company offering an app or internet platform but which can be quite irritating or even dangerous to ordinary, everyday people who are impacted by it.
In most industries, marketers have strong preventative guardrails in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening, and you know what?
That’s actually a good thing.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
When I was a baby in the 1980s, my parents’ family car was a Ford Pinto, and it’s not hard to understand why: it was priced very affordably at the time and gave them an opportunity to own a newer car than they might have otherwise been able to afford. But it made my grandparents and relatives very nervous to know my parents were driving me around in it because the Ford Pinto was also pretty legendarily notorious at the time for a design defect that placed the gas tank too close to the bumper, resulting in several collisions turning into full-on infernos.
Ford could have fixed the problem, but while they evaluated their options, they famously authored a document called the “Pinto Memo” in 1973 performing a cost-benefit analysis on correcting the design flaw in existing models that found that the cost of reducing fire risks in rollover events was $137 million but that the design changes would only generate a benefit to society of $49.5 million to save 180 people from death and another 180 people from serious burn injuries.
The magazine Mother Jones published an article called “Pinto Madness” in 1977 framing the Pinto Memo as a callous document supporting profits over people. The article also claimed, incorrectly, that somewhere between 500 to 900 people had been killed due to fires caused by the Pinto’s design.
Now, I’m not defending Ford, and they did lose a court case over this whole matter in 1978 where a jury determined they were liable for $127.8 million in damages, an unheard of amount at the time. The trial judge later reduced their punitive damages to $3.5 million. Ford lost their appeal to that amount, too.
What I do think history gets wrong, and this has been pointed out in several articles since, is that Ford wasn’t being maliciously callous and that the Pinto Memo’s contents were misunderstood. On the other hand, reports have shown that the design flaw would have cost them maybe $9-15 per vehicle to address during production, which is pretty hard to ignore when you consider that even one person being killed or maimed in a preventable situation caused by a known defect is one too many.
Ford bowed to social and political pressure in 1978 and recalled the Pinto along with some models of the Mercury Bobcat to correct the problem. The car my parents were driving was very likely one of the safer newer models, but it didn’t matter. The brand was forever tainted, and Ford retired the model in 1980. Obviously, my parents were among the people who couldn’t trust the Pinto anymore, though I will note that their next car was also a Ford that served us as a family vehicle into the early 1990s.
But more importantly, and relevant to our discussion here, is that there was now a major legal precedent for automakers to take responsibility for defects and to not only issue prompt recalls as situations were uncovered, but also to be proactive about finding them and communicative to customers about them.
This has since been extended to product manufacturers of all types, and it not only impacts retail channels, where retailers and manufacturers are expected to take responsibility for communicating recalls or dangerous defects to customers who buy flawed products, but also secondhand channels, where it is illegal to knowingly sell products that are under recall and secondhand retailers like eBay, Savers or Goodwill are responsible for ensuring that they check products for bans, recall or safety risks before putting them out for sale.
These rules are definitely great for the lawyers – they keep them employed year-round – but I would also argue these rules are important for marketers too. Setting guardrails in place so that products and services are safe and responsible helps to ensure that there is a minimal danger to human beings and other living creatures like pets in the commercial marketplace.
Consumers are free to assume that the food they buy, the clothes they wear, the appliances they rely on, the vehicles they drive and the electronics they enjoy are all rigorously tested and comply with safety standards and regulations.
And marketers are free to assume that their job of making the product or service desirable so that sales can happen more easily and with a stronger degree of confidence. There’s less need to pull products from sale, to try to do damage control to save a flawed brand or to bring in the PR experts to try to shift the discussion away from bad corporate behavior.
The competitive environment is also fairer for everyone involved because cutting corners brings with it not just lower quality, but potentially expensive legal liability, and it puts some burden on the consumers to not just go with the low-cost option, but to consider the importance of guarantees and protections when making a purchase.
In a world where there are rules, everyone wins, and the fun and excitement of talking about a product, service or brand isn’t marred by tragedy and controversy.
Of course, we all know that corners still get cut, and tech companies are some of the worst offenders due to their philosophy of “move fast and break things,” which is very much at odds with the traditional manufacturing and production philosophies of near-perfect consistency.
So let’s look at a few recent situations where the lack of guardrails has been harmful to the companies involved.
One example is Fisker Group, an electronic vehicle company that went out of business in 2024 after briefly being listed on the New York Stock Exchange starting in 2020. Fisker wowed the investment community with big promises and partnerships and even planned a line of mass market vehicles called the Fisker Ocean, Pear, Ronin and Alaska, all of which were believed to be firm challengers to Tesla’s lineup of electric cars.
The Fisker Ocean was highly hyped and started shipping in 2023. Reviews weren’t great and early adopters were complaining about the car’s software, but Fisker was particularly harmed by a review from the YouTube channel Auto Focus by Marques Brownlee that was titled, “This is the Worst Car I’ve Ever Reviewed.” Ouch. Fisker wound up in bankruptcy in 2024 and is no longer a company today.
Last year, a private baby formula company called ByHeart recalled all of its infant formula products. ByHeart is no fly by night – they’re carried in Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, Wegmans and Publix, among other stores. But in November of last year, reports of infants fed with the formula developing cases of botulism started to surface. ByHeart handled the situation badly at first, issuing a voluntary recall of two batches of formula and insisting that the testing itself was flawed. Third-party testing later found that no, ByHeart’s products were contaminated. A total of 31 infants across 15 states were sickened and ByHeart is now facing a lawsuits from some parents.
Also last year, the robotaxi company Waymo found itself in hot water as the Austin, TX Independent School District issues a report that showed that the robotaxis were blowing past city school buses. They tried to contact Waymo and settle the matter privately, but all Waymo did was supposedly issue a software patch – one that didn’t fix the problem and which prompted the Austin ISD to release videos to the public.
This brought a lot of scrutiny on Waymo, causing it to suspend service in San Francisco when a blackout revealed that the cars didn’t know how to operate properly at knocked-out stoplights. And there are many, many anecdotal stories of Waymo passengers observing the cars driving curiously or pedestrians fearing the cars might hit them. There are also two known crashes that have led to fatalities. Waymo touts its stellar safety record and says its cars are in 88% fewer crashes with serious injuries than those with human drivers, but experts often say these data are misleading and don’t reflect known cases documented by third parties.
And while there’s a story in today’s news about how a Waymo vehicle in San Mateo delivered two delinquent, inebriated 15-year-old vandals to the police instead of their intended destination when the passengers decided to shoot orbeez beads at people they passed by, people online are already questioning the details and wondering if this is a marketing stunt intended to win public support rather than an actual story.
Because when you have a lousy record of caring for the people around you, as Waymo does, insisting that a product can then determine a customer’s guilty or innocence while it’s in use doesn’t sound like such a great deal. In fact, Waymo’s marketing should probably be less about punitive police actions towards teens who were bound to wind up in police custody anyway and more about how they’re working to ensure that their rides are safe for everyone involved.
And this brings me back to Lime, the electric bike rental company that allowed a rogue rider to turn a poor London lady’s pleasant afternoon into years of pain. There absolutely need to be guardrails around these rental services, and they have to be more than a software update. But you know how you get Lime to be accountable to do things like employ geofencing to limit speeds in pedestrian areas or utilize better safety standards to ensure 10-year-olds aren’t riding the bikes in the first place?
You make them play by the same rules as everyone else. And that means a safer, better marketplace for us all to compete in.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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