Managing brand reputation in a ‘pass it on’ world
By Wayde Bull, Planning Director at Principals.
One of the funniest customer complaint letters on the web today is from a Virgin Atlantic passenger, Oliver Beale, who shares his ‘culinary journey from hell’ on a flight from Mumbai to London. His lengthy tongue-in-cheek email, addressed to Richard Branson and cc’d to the world is punctuated by close-ups of the curious meal, no doubt captured on a mobile phone. “Look at this Richard, just look at it” Beale urges, “I know it looks like a baaji but it’s in custard”.
Beale’s multi-media comedy of errors has been entertaining frequent fliers for months, but has no doubt created headaches for Virgin Atlantic’s corporate affairs team, given the speed with which the story has spread from conventional to social media. Virgin’s immediate response was a classic corporate deflection, describing their Indian in-flight cuisine as award winning and stressing that all passengers, Beale included, had the choice of Western style meals on-board. So there. Virgin Atlantic’s subsequent response was more self-assured and ‘back on brand’.
Branson picked up the phone to Beale and invited him to Virgin’s catering base, to help select future on-board meals and wines, to better match his personal tastes. A fun story with a happy ending, but what lessons can brand managers draw from such viral tales? In many ways this is a timeless example of customer complaint, where an individual is sufficiently provoked by a poor brand experience to put their feelings into writing. Yet social media are transforming what used to be largely private exchanges between customers and companies into a spectator sport.
Astute customers, like Beale, are growing to understand that their needs and problems are taken more seriously – more quickly – if they engage businesses in mediums where other customers are watching. As the social media commentator Mark Bunting explains “These days a company’s voice is no louder than those of its critics and often what its critics say has a lot more credibility.” This demands companies start devoting serious resources to becoming great online listeners; to invest in scanning tools to spot emerging customer issues, to track the opinions of prominent bloggers and to pick up sudden shifts in brand sentiment. For the sooner a business understands the specifics of customer issues bubbling up online, the sooner it can start to engage with the crowd and sincerely answer them. But who in the organisation jumps in and joins the conversation with customers?
It’d be great if every Australian business leader followed Branson’s example and picked up the phone, at least occasionally, to a disgruntled customer. But the management conundrum is that an effective social media strategy falls somewhere between the customer service, PR, brand marketing and insights functions today. It’s going to take new customer insight tools, more integrated customer management structures and a whole lot of leadership by example to place authentic customer conversations at the heart of a business.
First published on AFR (www.afr.com) 27th August 2009
