Crisis Management: The true test of a brand in the social media marketspace
To celebrate the fourth of May (also referred to as Star Wars Day, for those of you who may be unaware), Brisbane-based clothing company, Black Milk Clothing posted this image to their Facebook page…
…which as result saw a significant number of fans express their disdain and annoyance due to the rather unsubtle implication that it is better or perhaps more desirable to resemble the woman on the left as opposed to the woman on the right — namely, Amy from The Big Bang Theory. When considering the target demographic of Black Milk Clothing, which is generally speaking, people of the quirkier nature that aren’t afraid to express themselves through sartorial uniqueness, it was understandably perceived by consumers to be an ignorant move on Black Milk’s behalf. Not only this, but the image itself completely contradicted the stipulated commandants of Black Milk, which, at the time, were specified on the Facebook page. In particular:
COMMANDMENT #1 — YOU SHALL BE EXCELLENT TO ONE ANOTHER, and COMMANDMENT #5 — YOU SHALL NOT MAKE CRITICAL COMMENTS ON OTHER WOMEN’S BODIES.
When a few of the Black Milk Facebook fans highlighted this discrepancy between their own rules and those of Black Milk, the users were blocked, their comments were promptly deleted, or they were confronted by condescending comments from the brand’s social media team, such as “to those saying that this is hating, bullying, body-shaming and misogyny — that’s just wrong! No one ever said that Amy looks ugly. We certainly don’t think that. If you think that, perhaps it says more about the way you view women than the way we do”. Consequently, this generated far more attention than the initial meme itself.
In typical social media fashion, the press was hot on the trail, and suddenly what was once believed to be an iconic Australian company, often praised for its considerable social media presence, was now a justifiably disliked brand by not only the Aussie community, but arguably the world for neglecting to respond appropriately to consumers in what many would call a crisis management scenario.
The sheer idiocy of the Black Milk controversy demonstrates the unbridled power social media has over a brand’s reputation. According to authors of Managing Brands in the Social Media Environment Sonja Gensler, Franziska Völckner, Yuping Liu-Thompkins and Caroline Wiertz, “the dynamic, ubiquitous, and often real-time interaction enabled by social media significantly changes the landscape for brand management”, arguing that brand managers have lost their pivotal role in controlling the image of a brand given that, nowadays, it is the consumer who is now greatly responsible for shaping a brand’s identity.
Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, supports this by stating “a brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is — it is what consumers tell each other it is”, and thus the old adage ‘the consumer is always right’, or rather the modern account of ‘all customer views are valid’ is more prevalent than ever in the social media marketspace. By dismissing the protesters, the on-the-fencers, or simply just anyone with a grievance is a sure path to customer-relations hell and public-relations purgatory.
The prevalence of this issue has reached such great heights that a term has in fact been coined to represent these ignorant companies who fail to acknowledge the importance of full transparency, open lines of communication, and rapid, apologetic response in the instance of crisis management. The Streisand Effect as its officially dubbed, reflects the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or in the case of Black Milk, respond negatively to a piece of information can lead to the unintended consequence of publicising the information (or image) more widely, in turn resulting in far more detrimental effects for the company at hand.
Named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California inadvertently generated further publicity than initially intended, the Streisand Effect is becoming increasingly rampant in today’s highly connected, highly transparent society whereby public dialog is more enriched than ever before. Evgeny Morozov, author of Living with the Streisand Effect Free speech and the Internet claims that “however revolutionary it may be, the Internet still hasn’t altered the basic law of human communication”, as simply being nice to your consumers is always the way for positive customer engagement, and “being hostile [will always result in] an open invitation for a cyber-fight”, or negative consequences.
For Black Milk Clothing, who undeniably fell victim to the Streisand Effect, what was supposed to be a humourous, light-hearted Facebook post turned into something so much more: consumers losing respect for a formerly loved company, and a company losing its consumers. In reality, this case is not just a matter of bad press — it’s a matter of fragmented faith. And in modern society, that’s something that consumers — the very people that these organisations depend on for not only business, but for positive word of mouth — will not tolerate.
COMMANDMENT #2. YOU SHALL NOT BE INAPPROPRIATE.
