“I once asked a truly great chef how he got to be so good. He said, ‘It’s all in the recovery. How you correct your mistakes.’”
—Billy Joel, And So It Goes
There’s a quiet brilliance in that quote from Billy Joel’s new documentary. It’s not about perfection, it’s about resilience. About owning the moment after the moment goes wrong. For great chefs, artists, and yes, great brands, what separates the average from the exceptional is how they respond when things don’t go as planned.
In the Cult Branding Workbook, we discuss the critical difference between brands people like and those they love. That difference often reveals itself in how a brand recovers, how it listens, how it adjusts, and how it honors the relationship with its most loyal customers.
Mistakes Are Human. Recovery Is Emotional
All brands make mistakes. A product flop. A tone-deaf campaign. A change that alienates your best customers. It’s easy to freeze, deflect, or overcorrect in those moments. But Cult Brands lean into the opportunity instead.
Why? Because recovery is one of the most intimate acts a brand can perform. It says, “We see you. We hear you. You matter.”
Netflix has misfired on pricing and programming decisions more than once, but the speed and clarity of its recovery often deepen loyalty. Apple has walked back design changes, not out of fear, but because listening to its core users is part of the brand’s DNA. These aren’t signs of weakness. They’re signals of trust.
The Cult Branding Rule of Contribution
In the Cult Branding framework, recovery aligns with the Golden Rule of Contribution: Cult Brands always give back. Owning a mistake and making it right is a powerful way of giving back to your Brand Lovers. It shows humility. It shows strength. And it builds something that can’t be bought: credibility.
Customers don’t expect perfection. But they remember how you made them feel when things went wrong.
Leadership in the Recovery Moment
As Billy Joel reminds us, recovery is a craft. It takes intention. It takes humility. And it takes leadership.
Ask yourself:
- When something goes wrong in your customer experience, do you have a system for turning it into a deeper connection?
- Is your internal team empowered to make things right in real-time?
- Do you know what “recovery” looks like from your Brand Lover’s perspective?
True brand loyalty isn’t built in the launch moment. It’s built in recovery.
The Art of Being Human
Billy Joel’s story isn’t just a music story; it’s a human story. And Cult Branding is, at its core, a human-centered strategy. Your customers don’t need you to be flawless. They need you to be real. And when you fall short, they need to know you care enough to get it right.
That’s where loyalty lives. So the next time your brand faces a misstep, don’t panic. Recover well. Because, as Billy said, that’s where the magic is.