Question

How do you react when customer reputation gets hurt?

  • 6 October 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 43 views
Roger Dudler
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This week’s headlines on Facebook raised some challenging questions for me. Facebook is a valued customer of ours, and in many ways, their reputation was hurt this week. We have their logo on our website, which leads me to the main question: does having the Facebook logo on our website affect the perception of our brand in a negative way?

 

I would love to hear your thoughts: If your customers’ reputation gets damaged in any way, how do you behave as a company? Do you take action in such a case, and if so, how?

Just so y’know, I work at Frontify – but all the views expressed here are mine alone

2 replies

Shawheen

Interesting! I would say if you had an oil company like Amplify Energy who just created an ecological disaster on the coast of California, I wouldn't necessarily want to highlight their company logo on a website. I dont think twice about seeing Facebook on your website… yet! 

With Amplify Energy, the product/offering (oil energy) is already controversial to begin with. And when they do something wrong, it highlights a global issue.

With Facebook, the output of how their product is used (by us) is the problem. The product itself does not create controversy, it allows us to create controversy.

It’s not as easy to measure how FB influences depression in teens for example. But it is very easy to measure the effect of an oil spill. 

Roger Dudler
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Thanks for your feedback. I agree, there‘s more obvious ones that you don’t want to have connected with your brand too much (which is also a very interesting and challenging discussion from an ethics standpoint). I wonder when there‘s a moment where the majority‘s perception flips for such a large brand. In Facebook‘s case I think it helps them that the main growth drivers, especially Instagram are named differently and many people don’t even know about the deep connection between the two.

Just so y’know, I work at Frontify – but all the views expressed here are mine alone

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