Blog Post #19

When I began my Fall semester at the University of Denver, I became aware of some alarming news about Chegg. During a time when college students like myself were taking exams, Chegg was avidly working against them. Chegg had been working with certain universities/professors to seed incorrect answers on practice tests. In other words, the company had strived to work against its #1 consumers, college students, for reasons I still cannot comprehend to this day. I had such amazing experiences with Chegg, and to find this information was just plain sad and hurtful.

My stance on incidents of professor collaboration is simple. Students go to Chegg to prepare for exams. If some of the answers are intentionally incorrect, how can we trust it as a test-prep tool? Looking at the readings I have done throughout the semester, I would relate Chegg's misguided actions to chapters 18 and 19 of Marketing Mistakes & Successes. These chapters highlight the ethical mistakes of Merck/Vioxx and Metlife and how both these brands severely damaged their brands by unethical product sales and presentation. In the case of Merck, the company failed to find faults in their product, Vioxx, early on, and it proved to have disastrous consequences; Merck was also very unprepared for the worst scenario. In the case of Metlife, illegal and unethical actions were attempted to be hidden, but ultimately, the truth always becomes uncovered. Ethical failures can greatly damage a brand; however, in the case of Metlife and hopefully for Chegg, they are not necessarily a death sentence. If a brand can find a way to restore ethical practices and trust back to its primary consumers and the public, there is always hope; however, said hope takes time.