This week’s prompts included:
Find an example of a personal or organizational brand meltdown and describe how the person or organization used different elements of identity to construct the brand and how the meltdown undermined the brand.
- and -
What about an identity shift in an organization? Analyze a time when a brand changed its identity — what led to the change, and how was it accomplished?
I ask your patience as I try to explain the meltdown of Comcast and its attempt to re-brand as Xfinity.
To start, please visit the following link and read through the comic. Copying the comic into this page would depreciate revenue for the artist, so it’s better to just give a link.
http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/google_fiber
(Though this comic is entirely safe, just a warning — The Oatmeal’s comics are sometimes very mature. Don’t wander from this comic unless you’re willing to endure the internet’s wiles.)
Xfinity is Comcast rebranded — there is just no other explanation. Xfinity does not outwardly admit this, attempting to emphasize its separate identity by touting over and over how its services differ from the Comcast standard, but Xfinity is owned by Comcast, and a contract with Xfinity is actually a contract with Comcast in the fine-print. (Here’s a link to a press release stating their relationship directly.)
Okay, so we have established Xfinity is Comcast rebranded. Now the question is — why was this necessary?
It does not take much effort to find scathing reviews of Comcast’s service.
This article explains Comcast has more FCC complaints than AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable combined. US laws are extremely strict (and rightfully so) with any use of frequency space and with any communications network (in the technical sense). The FCC has strict policies in place to protect both the electromagnetic airspace in use in the US as well as customers relying on providers offering telecommunication services. They tend to take complaints seriously.
Here’s a Quora post concerning some of the more common Comcast complaints.
And here’s an absolutely massive listing of Comcast customer service reviews.
I’ll stop here — suffice it to say that Comcast is not well-regarded.
So how did Comcast build its identity to start with?
They first began by offering a service. They then began to refine their service, adding features exclusive to their brand, touting their performance over others. They used several of the book’s Chapter 7 techniques to foster an identity for their employee base.
First, Comcast has a rigid hierarchical structure. Like systems such as the DMV, lower-level customer service and technical support have extremely little power, and to do any action outside a predefined flow chart for their employee level, they must bump the call to a higher level employee. While such rigid hierarchy is tremendously common in large service providers, Comcast’s employees seem to have especially little power and ability to adapt to a customer’s needs. See any of the complaints above for evidence of this.
Next, Comcast seems to provide skills (or at minimum require them) for different levels of employees. This is most evident when taking calls from technical support with Comcast. So-called “Tier One” technical support can do very little except read off steps in a manual. “Tier One” installation technicians seem to be able to do an exact number of things without fail, but the moment some obstacle comes into play, the technician is lost. To achieve more complex or individual problem solving, a customer must seek higher-ranking employees. These employees seem to be better-trained and more versed in various procedures and troubleshooting steps, and they seem to have a better understanding of how the Comcast systems actually work. The examples listed before illustrate this. In this way, it seems as though Comcast seeks to provide some of its employees with specific skill sets relative to their rank as an employee. It all seems very rigid.
Like the firefighters dealing with the Mann Gulch disaster, Comcast employees seem to falter under exceptional circumstances. Present Comcast with a gift card or discount code? It may take months to resolve the savings — if ever. Having trouble getting an installation technician to actually show? It seems a complaint to the FCC could mend the issue, but no amount of calls to Comcast itself can bring about change. Seeing charges to your internet bill when you know with certainty no bandwidth has been used? Nothing more than weeks of exceptional preparation and effort will assuage the bill. (See above links for sources.)
Why might this happen? I postulate the culprit is rigidity. Employees seem to be allowed only a small number of actions based on their position. With this kind of rigidity, any adversity — anything requiring action outside the allowed flowchart — will result in meltdown, just like the firefighters experienced with their ambiguous leadership and commands.
Comcast’s legendarily awful customer service and satisfaction has plagued them for the better part of a decade, and yet with the company’s position as one of the only television and internet providers available in many areas, their status as a company has been waverless. It is perhaps their terrible reputation that led them to branch off as Xfinity in 2010. This was done surprisingly quietly — it’s not obvious, looking at the Xfinity products and services, that Comcast is the real back-end. But it is very obvious that Comcast is seeking to forge a new image, a new identity — and this isn’t surprising, given their overwhelmingly negative reception and public opinion.
So what is the image of Xfinity?
Well, so far, it seems to be just about everything Comcast is plus attractive service features. When dissatisfied with Comcast service, customers will be pushed toward the different and vastly varied services of Xfinity. Services such Tivo-style recordings, faster internet services, and particular access to television networks (HBO, Cinemax, Fox, Food Network, etc.) are the hallmarks. And yet the defining points behind Comcast’s identity remain with Xfinity — the back-end of Xfinity is just Comcast. It comes with all the bad customer service, bad installation servicing, and bad technical support. They haven’t fixed the problem — just slapped a new brand over the old.
Words: 998
All negativity aside, I want to emphasize some empathy with Comcast. It is a difficult bill to fit. They are enormous, their services are incredibly varied and vast, and they’ve purchased a number of companies and networks, only further-complicating the job of running such a vast enterprise. In fact, so vast is Comcast that the US government has begun looking into their holdings to rule on a monopoly status and actions to deal with such a ruling. It has to be unbelievably difficult to manage such a company — to do so would almost certainly require rigidity and hard-stamped roles for employees. The negativity in this post is directed at Comcast as the enterprise and not at Comcast employees.
