Vice President of Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations at The Goddard School.
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Managing your brand’s reputation is a balancing act. Companies must be constantly poised to both respond effectively to crises and proactively build consumer trust.
In my last article on common challenges surrounding reputation management, I outlined a series of general solutions for companies to implement in response to negative feedback. Now, let’s look at a few examples of how companies have managed to creatively secure their strong online reputations, and what marketers can learn.
Getting Ahead Of The Curve
Consistently putting your best foot forward instead of waiting to react to a crisis will help earn your customers’ trust. Too often, a brand’s customer service or crisis strategy is reactive — a risky and slow approach. Rather, brands should dedicate time and resources to creating a proactive plan that predicts and resolves issues before they occur. This also helps to foster a strong reputation for putting customers first.
A great example of a company proactively cultivating a strong reputation is Chewy. When one customer contacted Chewy asking to return the cat food she had ordered from the company because her cat passed away, the company immediately issued her a refund and sent a bouquet of flowers and a note expressing their condolences for her loss. This type of personalized attention is normal for Chewy; some have even reported getting oil paintings of their beloved pets.
Another example is from 2014, when the Dutch airline KLM took to social media to help passengers locate items they lost on flights in an effort to create a better customer experience. In a video, KLM employees talked about their efforts to monitor social media and check their airplanes for lost items after each flight, and introduced Sherlock, a dog with a multipocketed vest branded with KLM’s logo who brough cellphones, headphones, toys and more back to their rightful owners. While Sherlock was only for the ad, it conveyed the company’s commitment to customer service.
What’s the best way to develop a proactive customer service approach that gets ahead of the problem? By creating a unique and tailored customer experience and by focusing on customer satisfaction. These two keys to success are clear in the examples shown by Chewy and KLM; they anticipated that their customers would experience challenges, such as the death of a pet or lost luggage, and were able to transform the problem into a unique experience that showed the customer they were valued.
Crisis Control
No matter how hard you try to prevent it, a brand crisis is always possible — whether it’s a misstep on the company’s part or something beyond its control.
A couple of years ago, teenagers started filming themselves eating Tide laundry detergent pods for what became known as the Tide pod challenge. This was likely not something Proctor & Gamble, Tide’s parent company, could have foreseen, but it handled the situation smoothly with an official warning statement and two attention-grabbing social media posts. Tide partnered with Rob Gronkowski, an influential NFL player, for a tweet reminding consumers that its pods are only meant for laundry — not for eating. The company also worked with social media companies to get the Tide pod challenge videos removed. This combination of swift communication and action helped the brand fight a dangerous trend.
Unfortunately, sometimes mistakes by companies do happen. After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Adidas sent an email to some customers without thinking about changing the subject line, which read, “Congrats! You survived the Boston Marathon!” When customers called Adidas out about the insensitive message, the company jumped into action and quickly issued a heartfelt apology. In owning up to its mistake in a timely manner and choosing its words carefully, Adidas was able to effectively minimize the impact of the email.
When responding to a crisis, there are a few things that leadership and communications teams must consider to ensure their message comes across as authentic and transparent:
1. Prevent further damage. It is important to take a swift pause on all marketing and external communications that were planned. Every single communication — from social media posts to email to advertisements — must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis following a crisis to ensure imagery, copy and overall tone are appropriate for the situation.
2. Apologize, and commit to doing better. This is often the trickiest part of turning the crisis around. Many companies in crisis fail to communicate the mistake they made. They often dance around a direct apology and do not outline a specific and immediate action plan for how they will improve or solve the problem going forward. In a crisis situation, it is imperative for brands to own what happened without placing blame elsewhere or making excuses. Brands must be ultra-sensitive in communication and use verbiage that will help instill trust, credibility and integrity back into the brand. They should be as clear as possible about the immediate steps the company is taking to correct the issue.
3. Avoid repeating mistakes. After the initial bleed and apology, it is critical for the company to take a step back to assess why the issue arose in the first place and then create an action plan to prevent it from happening again. This may be as simple as adding in new layers of review daily, or it may require a change in leadership.
If we know anything about the digital age, it’s that technology trends are changing faster than ever, which means that keeping up with your brand’s online presence will likely only get more complicated in the future. No matter what your company’s reputation management plan looks like, always remember to be proactive and ready for anything and stay true to your consumers — and your brand.
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