Customer feedback and the process to analyze and create proactive policies based on it is an important component of business success. The customer has always been king. In today's connected and virtual world, the customer has taken on even more significance in making and breaking brand identities.
The shift of corporate resources toward customer relations has come at the expense of internal corporate dialog and communication. Two recent business decisions outlined below demonstrate how the PR advisory function has eroded to dangerous levels within some prominent corporate decision-making hierarchies.
Maker's Mark whisky COO Rob Samuels emailed a group of brand ambassadors for the spirit on February 9 this year that the recipe of the popular whiskey was changing effective immediately to 84 proof from 90 proof. The dilution was necessary in order to keep up with unexpected international demand. The change was fine, he stated, because taste test results showed no difference between the two samples.
On October 6, 2010, GAP, Inc., at the time the world's second largest apparel manufacturer, introduced a new logo which was announced on their corporate web site. The project was overseen by Marka Hansen, president of GAP brand, North America. The previous logo had been in use since the 1980's. The new design was promoted as a "contemporary and current design."
The results in both cases were startlingly similar. Reaction in social media exploded immediately to the Maker's Mark strategy and GAP graphic design. The onslaught was so relentless that both decisions were reversed within one week of being announced, despite the time, effort and money invested in planning and implementing them. "We've heard loud and clear that you don't like the new logo," GAP stated on their Facebook page on October 12, 2010. The original logo was brought back and Hansen was out of the company four months later. On February 16 this year, Maker's Mark COO Rob Samuels tweeted "You spoke. We listened. And we're sincerely sorry we let you down." The plan to literally dilute the brand was scrapped.
These cautionary tales illustrate the declining impact of public relations counsel to top-level decision makers in some corporate cultures. In companies as sophisticated as Maker's Mark and GAP, it is beyond reason to believe their own PR teams did not raise red flags forcefully and immediately to the proposed courses of action. The degree of projected consumer backlash may understandably have been misjudged at the time, however the anticipated arc of the story could not have been overlooked. Both these situations could and should have been completely avoided with prudent PR strategy and outreach.
Top management made these decisions over the objections of their own PR advisors because the decision-makers earned their degrees in a business environment that no longer existed. It's not that they're old. It's a factor of business fundamentals that are changing at such a rapid pace. Armed with these outdated philosophies, the GAP and Maker's Mark leaderships believed that consumers were important as components of the larger market as a whole. They could not understand, even at the insistence of their PR teams, that the reverse is equally true today - that the market is made up of individual customers, each of whom through social media and the internet has the same reach and potential to influence others as any multi-national corporation.
So the one key to successful connection with customers is for key leadership to treat employees as the most knowledgeable of all customers. Inbound marketing is as much an internal corporate goal as it is an external marketing strategy. Accept and embrace that in the ever-changing virtual landscape that is today's communications environment, input from the inside cubicles should flow to the corner office with more speed and more relevance than it ever has before.
For GAP and Maker's Mark, learning that lesson became a sobering reality.
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