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Embrace Transparency To Reclaim Control of Your Brand Message
By dan | April 22, 2007
Marketing is no longer about crafting a rigid, isolated message.
Marketing is about how you handle your half of the conversation.
I just listened to an episode of Marketing Voices that featured an interview of Guy Kawasaki. It’s a short, feel-good interview that packs an education. One topic that was covered is the fact that widely-known brands (such as Coke) may have brand equity affected by consumer-to-consumer conversations that influence public opinions about their brand. In other words, a company is no longer the one and only source that creates influencial marketing messages about their brand. I’ll mention the same example used by Guy, the Diet Coke & Mentos phenomenon.
Swimming Downstream through the Social Networks
I agree with Guy, this incident should be embraced by those two companies. Perhaps Mentos should even encourage these experiments to try to prolong the brand’s time in the spotlight. It could produce and market a special edition Mentos that reacts twice as strongly to Diet Coke (or reacts differently in other ways). And then challenge people to take video of their most elaborate DC/Mentos experiments.
Who knows?! Why not?
The DC/Mentos event was positive. But what happens when blatantly negative news about your brand circulates throughout the social networks? Could this type of event be a brand-killer? Well, in most cases, your brand can overcome extremely negative brand equity - even end up stronger than before the incident happened.
Handling Negative Publicity in Social Networks
React strategically. How you react to consumer-generated messages can have a much stronger influence over public opinion than the original consumer-generated messages.
Obviously, this isn’t a new concept for Marketing & PR. Think about other similar contact points with consumers: disaster recovery PR or customer service. It is possible to create greater brand equity than ever existed before simply by strategically reacting to negative messages about your brand.
The Consumer Consensus
Consumers, generally speaking, are becoming more and more aware that companies cannot control everything said about their brand. Most consumers will even accept that companies do make mistakes or bad judgment calls. On top on that, many consumers understand that every opinion that arises in social space is not by default an expert voice. Because of this, most consumers will look to how a company reacts to complaints and other negativity.
How Social Networks Upped the Ante
Social networks have created one huge change in how companies need to handle public relations. After you make your PR statement, it only takes less than a hour for 10,000 resentful consumers to call you out for spouting bulls**t.
This wasn’t possible before blogs, podcasts, & social sites.
The Solution?
If negative publicity smacks your brand in the face, don’t gamble away your only chance for redemption. If your brand has one chance to publicly respond to negative publicity, don’t waste it by providing your critics fuel for their rebuttal.
New media has enabled communication between once isolated disenfranchised consumers. The best strategy is authenticity and transparency.
Topics: Social Media, Brand, User-Generated, Community, social networking |
