Brand Management Takes On a Whole New Importance
Brand management is something that every business needs to be aware of. Regardless of your company size, brand management needs to be part of your everyday marketing efforts. If not, you could stand to lose customers and even your entire business to a disaster. Managing your brand used to be a much simpler task, but with the rapid onslaught of social media technology, brand management is now a nightmare, especially if you are not prepared for an emergency. It can take only a few short hours to damage your reputation through the spread of information on social media.
Why it's important to respond quickly
Before social media, companies had several days and even weeks to get control of something damaging. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, a company now needs to respond within hours. Don’t think so? Well, let’s ask Dominos’ Pizza. In 2009, a couple of employees from one of their North Carolina franchises decided to make a “prank” video. The video showed how the store prepared its food and let’s just say that talking about it here in detail would likely cause you to never eat there again. The video was posted on YouTube and within a few days it topped 1 million hits. It was just a joke, right?
What may seem like a joke turned into a huge PR disaster for Dominos. For those familiar with reputation management, posting videos on YouTube is a big “no-no” unless you are 100% sure that it will not cause damage to your brand. Obviously this video was not run by management but now the damage begins. Dominos failed to respond in a timely manner. Although they were made aware of video, it took them 48 hours before they addressed it with the public. This is a pretty short time, but the damage was already done. According to an article in Forbes Magazine, 10- to 15-year customers were now second-guessing the brand, something you do not want to happen to your business. All that aside, here is how Dominos “failed.”
More articles from AllBusiness.com:
- Business Insurance Basics: 14 Key Terms You Need to Know
- 4 Tips to Maintain the Financial Health of Your Startup
- 6 Rules to Protect Your Business From Making False Business Claims
Why Dominos was behind from the beginning
According to Time Magazine, Dominos created a Twitter account to help fight off attacks and move into damage control mode. That’s right. A company that had more than $1.4Billion in revenue in 2008 and used the Internet as a way to blast advertising and coupons in an attempt to gain more business did NOT have a Twitter account? I guess I will let them run their own marketing campaigns, but will probably stay away from purchasing stock in the company any time soon. The company also hoped that people would stop talking about the video and that they would not need to respond to it. Unfortunately, it escalated to a point where they needed to make a statement. Unfortunately for them, getting out in front of this immediately on a Twitter account that they should have had years prior could have helped them maintain their image with those 10- to 15-year customers who started to doubt them.
Confronting brand issues immediately is something that your company must do if you expect to survive in today’s business world. It only takes one YouTube video to put a billion dollar company in jeopardy; what do you think it would take to put your less than $ 1 million a year small business in jeopardy? When confronting these issues, make sure that you are prepared as you also do not want to respond “from the gut.” Having a plan in place prior to anything bad happening will give you a leg up if (and more likely when) your brand is in jeopardy.
RELATED: 11 Simple Ways to Grow Employee Engagement in Social Media
