Bringing your brand back from the brink
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The internet and in particular social networking sites have changed the rules of handling a branding crisis, yet most companies - Toyota being one of the latest examples - are risking their brands’ reputations by failing to adapt their defence strategies to the real-time and candid nature of the online environment.
- To read the case study on First Direct click here
- To read about Toyota and Tiger Woods sponsorship click here
- For Vikki Chowney, editor at Reputation Online’s expert viewpoint click here
Dealing with a crisis is all about restoring control. But social media has made keeping a brand’s reputation from harm much harder, because the need to respond is now a real-time issue.
While many companies are using networks such as Twitter and Facebook for marketing purposes, many are forgetting that they are real-time tools, vital in times of managing a crisis.
Toyota’s failure to respond quickly to customer concerns, for example, is what attracted it such heavy criticism. The car brand has been forced to recall more than 8 million cars over the past three months. It announced its recall in the US in January this year to immediate consumer concern but took a further week to announce that the problem was global.
That lag in real-time response could have cost the car marque up to £7bn in brand value, according to Brand Finance’s valuation estimates. This figure could be devastating at a time when the car industry is struggling to revitalise itself after a protracted economic downturn.
Because Toyota failed to address all its safety issues at once, the story continues to run and run. Just last week, global media outlets ran a video news clip showing an American man describing how he feared for his life when his Toyota Prius brake pedals failed. The story has not moved on.
Other brands have also fallen foul of the new world communications order. Children’s buggy maker Maclaren announced that its buggies were being recalled in the US following reports that several children had lost fingers in its mechanism. But it told Europeans that the very same buggies were not being recalled, leading to many confused parents discussing their concerns over safety on forums.
The initial lack of social media response by both brands highlights their failure to recognise that the internet has changed the line of communication between brand and consumer, according to Allan Blair, director of social media at DDB UK.
“Companies probably had 24 hours in the old days to respond to a crisis and get ahead of the game. Social media and the internet in general has reduced this to the first hour.”
Jonathan Hemus, Insignia
Brands have a fear that putting out communications in the online world will lead to more negativity, Blair says, when the opposite is true. Social media can mend problems rather than make them worse.
“It’s not all negative for brands. When Toyota started doing things with social media, it galvanised the brand. It has Facebook groups offering support. If this communication had been done earlier, then maybe many of the brand’s problems could have been negated,” he explains.
The value of understanding the importance of marketing and communications across multiple platforms is substantial, according to latest YouGov figures. Toyota’s ranking in the research company’s brand perception table has already leapt to 34th place from a low of 40th at the end of February.
The Japanese car company is now employing a reassurance marketing strategy to rebuild its reputation, telling customers in adverts that “We’re pulling together to make things right”. Incentives such as extended warranties will also be offered to encourage customers back to the brand, as figures show that UK orders have fallen by 7%.
BA, meanwhile, is using YouTube for the first time in its crisis management plans. It has posted a video presented by chief executive Willie Walsh in response to the proposed crew strike action, announced last weekend. The airline is hoping that engaging with customers early with clear information directly from the top will lessen the bad feeling towards the company.
Getting your message across fast is essential. A slow response is a sign that a brand or corporation doesn’t have a proper crisis management strategy in place, argues Jonathan Hemus, director of reputation management and communications consultancy Insignia. He estimates that at least half of global companies prefer to hope for the best rather than plan for the worst.
“What companies are getting wrong primarily is the preparation phase. They’re not investing sufficient time and investment into making sure they’re prepared if a crisis occurs,” he notes.
Many still have an old-world mentality when it comes to dealing with a crisis. He argues: “Companies probably had 24 hours in the old days to respond to a crisis and get ahead of the game. Social media and the internet in general has reduced this to the first hour.”
Hemus says that considering the amount of money and time that companies invest in their brand, the lack of planning appears negligent.
Being able to respond quickly can help avert damage to the brand in the long run. Domino’s Pizza was praised for its quick response a year ago to some undesirable videos made by employees and posted on YouTube. One showed a staff member putting cheese up his nose before adding it to a customer’s pizza.
Wheels of diplomacy: Maclaren left parents to vent their concerns online; while Branson took personal control of the 2007 Virgin train crash
The fast-food company posted its own YouTube video in response, presented by its chief executive. It also created a Twitter feed in quick response to the employees’ exposé.
Similarly, supermarket Asda turned to YouTube when a former employee posted a video of himself running riot in a store, urinating and licking a raw chicken. Not only did the company respond at a corporate level, but it got other employees at the same store to put their responses on the video site. The four staff members, one apparently close to tears, expressed shock and disappointment at their former colleague’s actions. They also asked customers to be reassured that this behaviour was not continuing. It gave the brand a human face when it needed more than a statement from the press office.
By contrast, cross-Channel service Eurostar came unstuck recently when its passengers were stuck in a tunnel following an electrical breakdown. Although the brand uses its Twitter feed for marketing, it left consumers disappointed that they were receiving no updates about the situation through the medium.
The brand’s social media agency I Am Social admitted on its blog that while it ran the online word-of-mouth campaign for Eurostar, the train company had not yet devised a plan for online crisis management.
Eurostar chief executive Richard Brown presented a YouTube video with an apology and a pledge to investigate what went wrong, but his response didn’t impress many crisis management experts.
Hemus says ineffective spokespeople can highlight that the crisis management infrastructure is flawed. In an age of social media, having an effective spokesperson to communicate such issues is really important, he argues.
“While I’m sure Richard Brown from Eurostar is a fantastic chief executive, he’s a poor communicator with the media. Likewise with Toyota; the chairman wasn’t very effective there either.”
It’s far better to have a spokesperson, whatever their level in the company, who can give the public the right information, than a poor communicator with the right job title giving out mixed messages.
The only situation where Hemus suggests the top man or woman is vital is where the crisis involves fatalities. Sir Richard Branson’s response to the fatal Virgin train crash in 2007 has been heralded as the right way to handle a difficult situation. Branson was quickly on the scene in person to communicate the facts and express condolences. All this while making sure he got across the message that it was faulty points on the track, not a broken train, involved.
At the same time, the Virgin marketing team ensured that no inappropriate marketing material was produced directly following the accident, such as money-off deals saying “price crash”. Instead, brand messaging was consistent and empathetic.
Many worst-case scenarios are ones that brands find almost impossible to predict. Eurostar’s Brown, for instance, admits that the train company had never experienced a situation that left passengers stranded in the tunnel.
But that’s no excuse, argues Hemus. “Companies undoubtedly face a tough situation. But what happens in the first few days of the crisis has an enormous effect on how quickly and how far the organisation can recover.”
Being honest about your flaws or the situation your company is facing is now a vital part of brand management, he says. The transparency and speed of social media makes “spin” more difficult to carry off successfully.
Getting it right can even improve a brand’s reputation if the issue is tackled quickly enough and in the right way. Last year, Marks & Spencer was able to build an entire marketing campaign around the fact it had been wrong to charge more for bigger bra sizes. In response to a Facebook campaign claiming that larger busts shouldn’t mean greater costs for shoppers, the brand accepted culpability and turned a negative situation into a positive one.
Papering over the cracks: Paperchase was forced to deny it had plagiarised an artist’s work after a consumer campaign gathered pace through Twitter
It immediately ran ads with the strapline “we boobed” and reversed the £2 surcharge on larger-sized bras. The ability to say sorry is an example of how brands can best respond to potentially damaging social media campaigning groups – and even drive up sales.
But going beyond apologising will be necessary if a brand such as Toyota hopes to restore its former reputation. Its marketing will need to show it has understood and reacted to the crisis effectively. The company is hoping that using third-party endorsement will help it in future. It has announced that an engineering company will conduct an independent analysis to demonstrate the safety of its cars. Additional incentives are being planned to encourage customers to come back to the brand.
Hemus says that getting third parties involved will help rebuild consumer trust in Toyota. “Although it’s not strictly necessary from a technical point of view, it’s going beyond what’s to be expected. Something like a further enhanced warranty which addresses that the cars are safe will be effective,” he suggests.
Extra reassurance is especially vital when a brand crisis affects one of the company’s core brand attributes. Toyota is built on reliability, so for it to fail in this area is more shocking to the public. Likewise, people are more affected by the infidelities of golfer Tiger Woods than other sportsmen because he was seen as a safe family man for marketers to use in product endorsement.
Constant communication is key to maintaining good business relations, says Royal Mail media director Mark Thomson, and the web is becoming an increasingly important way to do that. “We’re a 24/7 company and the web can provide advice around the clock.”
Over-communicating via all channels is vital during a crisis, he argues – something the company tried to do during the postal strike action last year. “In those moments, you need to make sure that top management don’t go missing,” he says. Thomson took the board on the road around the UK to make sure customers such as Amazon and LoveFilm were kept well informed of the issues as well as to offer them a face-to-face apology. Ultimately though, he says, getting back to a good service level as quickly as possible is “the best way of demonstrating that companies shouldn’t lose faith”.
When a brand’s key attributes are damaged, it can take a great deal of work to bring the brand back to its former glory, says Lisa Thomas, chief executive of agency Lida. For Tiger Woods, that could mean simply performing well on the golf course again, but for Toyota she suggests that it might have to find a technology breakthrough in safety to re-establish its reputation.
“You have to make sure you’re true to your brand and true to your customer. In repairing it, you need to go back to the customer and understand what their expectations are,” she adds.
It’s not all doom and gloom for brands, however. Jon Ingall, managing partner of agency Archibald Ingall Stretton (AIS), says that reputations can always be repaired – it might just take some time.
He points to car brand Skoda. The car was seen in the UK as being unreliable and undesirable, but after agreeing a joint venture deal in 1991, Volkswagen wanted to rehabilitate the reputation of the Czech brand.
While Skoda didn’t have to respond to a specific crisis, it knew that consumers were embarrassed to be associated with it. Ingall recalls an old joke: “People would say that they’d rather get caught out getting off the back of a sheep than getting out of a Skoda.”
It has taken ten years and a complete rethink to turn around the car’s reputation, he argues. AIS worked with Skoda alongside its advertising agency Fallon to seek out those consumers who might reconsider the car brand. It did this through embracing the jokes about the car and turning them around to imply consumers not prepared to try a Skoda were now the butts of the joke. Ingall says: “The ads were honest, accepting that the reputation historically hadn’t been great.”
Skoda’s story illustrates that even brands seen as being on the brink of failure can be brought back with the right attitude and enough time.
The modern dilemma is how to build, rebuild and maintain a reputation in the glare of social media. Reputation is something that his agency is looking at more closely, Ingall claims.
“We are constantly monitoring what’s being said on Facebook and Twitter. The challenge is when to address the bad things that people say. When do you intervene? When do you not intervene?”
Understanding when and how to get involved in social media when you’re facing a crisis is something that brands and corporations are still grappling with. The problem they have to overcome is that businesses don’t own reputations as much as they used to, argues DDB’s Blair.
“Brands aren’t necessarily what they tell people they are. It’s consumers who can see what they are and what their friends say they are,” he says. And if companies don’t respond to the new real-time world order quickly, they could find themselves with a damaged reputation that really is beyond repair.
One to bank on: First Direct gives its customers freedom to vent their ire or heap their praise through a social media hub, and comments are then quickly acted on
Case study: First Direct
When a customer says something good about your brand, it makes sense to publicise this. But would you be happy making negative comments widely available on your brand website? Online and telephone banking service First Direct has developed a real-time feedback site called Live, for customers to relate the good, the bad, and even the very ugly.
Managing reputations online is becoming more difficult for brands as unprompted conversations about companies happen between customers. So First Direct has decided that if people are talking about it on various forums and blogs, then it might as well form a central hub to bring these views together.
The banking crisis of 2008-2009 prompted the brand to think about how to build a better relationship with its customers. It felt the general loss of trust in financial services didn’t reflect what First Direct’s own customers thought of its brand, explains Natalie Cowen, head of brand at the bank.
“When we speak to our customers, trust is something that they feel about us,” she says.
The bank has won several awards for trust in the last couple of years, and Cowen says it wanted to capitalise on this by opening up an online space where people could talk honestly about their experiences of First Direct.
The hub gives customers some control of the brand’s reputation, argues Cowen. “For us, the powerful thing about the live site is that it gives our customers a voice in a social media space.” With around a third of customers joining the bank following recommendations, the site is a place for this word-of-mouth to continue without the heavy hand of the brand, adds Cowen.
“People really value the opportunity to write and read reviews, and they look to reviews sites for guidance on products and services. It’s a powerful way of showing people what our customers think of us,” she says.
While First Direct has a more positive online glow than most banks, it still has to contend with unsatisfied customers venting their views on various forums. But this hasn’t discouraged the bank from creating a real-time response site, says Cowen.
“We were very clear from the start that it was going to be the good and the bad and that was the only transparent and honest way of doing things.”
Comments on the live site are also fed into First Direct’s advertising campaigns. Commuters on London Underground, for example, have been able to view real positive customer comments, but the marketing team hasn’t ruled out using more negative feedback in future.
Both the positive and negative feedback is important for any brand to understand and one of the additional benefits of the live site. The comments fed into the site are grouped into different themes so that the key issues get fed back into the different areas of the business.
A buzz tracker is available on the home page, which tells customers the percentage of positive, negative or neutral comments flying around. While this has stayed relatively stable since the launch of the site, Cowen says if it fluctuates wildly, it enables the business to find out what’s going wrong very quickly.
“From our perspective it’s about understanding what’s causing that,” explains Cowen.
“Quite often customers self-regulate. Someone might start a conversation and then someone else will disagree. The talk might look like it’s going down a negative path but then someone will say they’ve had a different experience.”
Natalie Cowen, First Direct
Continuing the conversation is becoming an increasingly important part of First Direct’s strategy. It is looking to engage in the social media conversation, but keen to understand when to jump in and when to allow the conversation to happen without its interference.
The brand doesn’t want to wade in at the first sign of a negative comment, says Cowen. “Quite often [the customers] self-regulate. Someone might start a conversation and then someone else will disagree with that. The talk might look like it’s going down a negative path but then another customer will come back and say they had a different experience.”
It is vital to remain credible to build up a positive reputation and brands can ruin natural word of mouth by being too keen, she warns. First Direct will soon be introducing a function enabling it to go onto the site to give information about products and services. But Cowen stresses that it doesn’t want to get too involved in contributing to the site.
First Direct is also looking at using Twitter as a customer services tool rather than simply a PR tool, which is how it is currently used. But as Cowen points out: “Once you start engaging in that space, there’s an expectation that you’ll continue that conversation all the time.”
She admits that maintaining and building reputation online is a constant learning process but this experience is part of the necessary reality of the social media space.
Trading personalities: Toyota and Tiger Woods
When golfer Tiger Woods read out a 15-minute prepared speech in February this year, responding to worldwide coverage of his marital infidelities, it aimed to smooth over his relationship with his many former sponsorship partners.
And when Toyota’s chairman Kazuo Okamoto issued an apology to its customers earlier this month, he admitted that the company had got too big, too quickly and needed a rethink in the way it responded to customers. He admitted: “Maybe now we will ask them [customers] to be more patient so we will really give them optimal quality.”
Both brands were apologising to their customers for very different reasons, but Al Moffatt, chief executive of agency network Worldwide Partners, believes they can learn from each other.
“They’ve got to steal a page from each other’s book,” he reflects. He says that Woods’ brand would benefit from acting in a more contrite manner as Toyota has done. Woods’ “apology” speech attacked the media rather than expressing remorse.
Toyota, in contrast, needs to take on a bit of Wood’s sportsman-like personality, says Moffatt. “Toyota needs to act more like Tiger Woods and be aggressive about getting the facts out there. The two essentially have to exchange their personas to correct their issues.”
Moffatt says the car brand has allowed the media and social networks to run with multiple stories without effectively communicating its own position.
Contrary to other crisis management experts, Moffatt believes Toyota should stand firm and not “overreact in terms of incentives”.
Communicating the right personality in a crisis will help consumers or corporates believe in a brand. But as Woods and Toyota demonstrate, it is difficult in the face of a knowledgeable public – especially through social media – to get the tone right.
Moffatt admits that it is a tricky balance: brands must adopt a careful balance between being too stiff in their response, so seeming insincere, or going too far in the apology.
Viewpoint – Vikki Chowney, editor at Reputation Online
Over the past few months, what began as basic customer service failures from the likes of Eurostar and Paperchase [following allegations that it plagiarised an artist’s work] became far bigger issues than they might have been, due to the influence of online chatter.
Once upon a time, complaints about delays and plagiarism might have been swept under the carpet, never to be uncovered. Now news of a brand’s bad behaviour can reach a global audience with frightening speed. With so many horror stories circulating in the press and scaring other businesses into a corner, the concept of proactive reputation management has never been so front of mind.
Is there any way to engage with the social media space and fix a problem? Can you employ traditional crisis management rules, or does the very nature of the internet change the game entirely?
The bottom line is that traditional rules still apply; you’re just dealing with a different environment. With proactive monitoring in place, it’s easier to look immediately at what’s being said, then put out a holding statement before allocating a spokesperson to ensure a consistent message. Post-evaluation is critical – especially within the social media space – where good or bad news spreads instantly.
Brands must think about the audience first when responding to an issue online – the message and the medium must come second. Using appropriate language and aligning any activity to overarching communications objectives is key. A brand that prides itself on being transparent shouldn’t shut up shop the moment something bad happens. That jars against the perceived personality of the company.
“Brands must think about the audience first when responding to an issue online - the message and the medium must come second.”
Vikki Chowney, Reputation Online
Ensuring that legal aspects are covered is always more time-consuming than a communications team thinks it should be, so getting people in the same room speeds this up. Ticking all of these boxes makes sure that the company being attacked becomes the credible source of information about the issue, which prevents speculation and the Twitter whispers from getting out of hand.
From a business perspective, customer service should be made second to none because it will be called upon – very publicly. You should be monitoring mentions of your brand constantly so you can react swiftly when something happens, even if it’s only with a holding statement.
Being seen to do something in a crisis is almost as important as actually doing it.
