Reputation and success

A good reputation is essential for a company’s growth, and the market’s perception of a company’s products is fundamentally conditioned by its past actions, by all those elements that users associate it with in their collective subconscious. Every time a company launches a product, the key attributes that will determine the success of that product are assessed by the market, examined, and judged on the basis of its reputation.

Facebook is making the first steps into the health care business, although the reasons why are not entirely clear. Which prompts the question as to whether Facebook users really want the company holding data related to such a sensitive area of their lives.

The problem, quite simply, is Facebook’s reputation regarding its users privacy. For many people, Facebook is the company that changes its terms and conditions so as to be able to garner as much information about them, in the process offending some groups, ruining surprise presents, and leading to one user being associated with a brand of sexual lubricant. And lest we forget, it has also carried out psychological experiments on its users. In response, it has, in some cases, listened to its users and tried to adapt, sometimes with laudable speed, but what most people remember is the negative stuff.

Nobody would deny that there are a lot of talented people working at Facebook, but it is still widely perceived as a company that has scant respect for its users. And there is no point in simply saying “the users are wrong”: it has mismanaged its reputation disastrously. And as for those cute little blue dinosaurs explaining how to adjust your privacy preferences, they arrived too late: most people see Facebook’s efforts as responding to a problem, for something it did wrong. It’s pretty obvious that Facebook’s approach is “better to say sorry than to ask permission”, which is hardly the best way to manage its reputation.

It’s obviously too early to predict how its for-the-moment hypothetical venture into the health care segment will pan out. But what seems clear is that the reputation Facebook has acquired will not give it much of a competitive edge, and that users will have to be persuaded to overcome many misgivings. It will be interesting to see if succeeds in doing so.

(En español, aquí)