A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the recent PR disaster at Domino's Pizza. To recap, Domino's suffered a major impact to brand perception as a viral video made by two less-than-savory employees in a Domino's kitchen rapidly and probably lastingly besmirched Domino's online presence.

I also noted that since this, media bloggers are in overdrive, trying to prepare damage control strategies to offer their clientèle in what everyone now understands are inevitable future instances of similar PR pandemics.

It strikes me, though, that in this instance an ounce of prevention would be worth a pound of cure. Or a ton.

While no one ought to attempt to justify the behavior of the two employees, it's worth considering that the whole incident might have been prevented if they had a different relationship to their employer. Many companies feel comfortable relying on the bad economy (or other mitigating factors) to motivate employees to perform well at their jobs. This means that these companies can jettison part of their own responsibility to help ensure satisfaction among their employees. Since they can, of course, they often do.

We all know, also, that there has been a particularly strong correlation established between happiness and productivity. We also know fewer Americans than ever are happy in their jobs. As any behavioral psychologist will tell you, when people are unhappy, they act out. Sometimes this means merely wasting company resources playing Solitaire all day, and sometimes it means making a video of yourself and your co-worker violating every health code known to man in your employer's kitchen, and then posting it on the Internet.

I don't have any strong evidence to demonstrate the relevance of these observations to this particular instance, but as a small business owner myself, I'm pretty sure they're worth considering.

You've no doubt heard about this by now, as it's been one of the most popular stories in the media for the past week.

If you haven't, here are the bullet points, excerpted from the New York Times article.

Two Domino's employees made a video in the restaurant's kitchen. In the video, one provides narration while the other performs gross violations of health-code standards. Within days:

1. The video had been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.
2. References to it were in five of the 12 results on the first page of Google search for "Domino's."
3. Discussions about it had contaminated Twitter.
4. The perception of Domino's quality among consumers went from positive to negative, according to online surveys at YouGov.

Photographs of ex-Domino's employees Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setzer from the Conover, N.C., Police Department

In just a few days, Domino's reputation was damaged. "We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea," said Domino's spokesman Tim McIntyre. "Even people who've been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino's, and that's not fair."

This is an interesting practical situation. Unlike in the case of Virgin Airlines, this incident does not seem to be as clearly attributable to the brand itself. Indeed, the analysis of the Domino's incident (and the recent similar one at Amazon, although that one may be slightly less apropos to my point here) has almost exclusively addressed damage control strategies for incidents of this type, treating them as rather more like a hurricane than as a symptom of endemic organizational problems.

I wonder, though, if there isn't something even more interesting to be found by treating them as the latter. If we can justly do this, and we do, then perhaps we can comport ourselves to the disease, rather than the symptom. I'm thinking about this now, and I'll try to write about it next week.