How To Lose Control Of Your Brand To Your Customers

Imagine this: a team of men with sledge hammers start deliberately smashing an expensive car to pieces, in front of admiring spectators. What's going on? Now read on...

Customers are finding new ways to express their pleasure (or dissatisfaction) with their suppliers, and can help build or wreak havoc with your company's brand image. With easy access to YouTube, Twitter and loads of similar services and blogs, your customers have plenty of scope to express their views online, and these strong views can be heard and seen all round the world.

Take, as an example, the frustration evident from a new car owner who has had problems that have remained unresolved - and the supply chain, reportedly, seemed unmoved about resolving them.

And this is felt even more strongly when you are talking about a very expensive auto.

You have probably never heard of Mr Han of Qingdao city in China's Shandong province. He is one of the new Chinese millionaires and took dramatic action about a faulty car. The car was only six months old but had had a string of problems from shortly after delivery. It is reported that it failed to start and went to the supplying garage to be fixed. Not only was it not fixed, but the car was damaged in the process.

Mr Han tried to sort out the issue with the local dealer, then he went to the China HQ, on to the Asia-Pacific regional level and finally even back to Volkswagen who are Lamborghini's owners. Yes, this was a really expensive car. The featured car was s Lamborghini Gallardo SuperCar costing something in excess of $500,000 after taxes in China.

After all his efforts have failed he has turned the event into a PR disaster for Lamborghini. He instructed some of his workmen, dressed smartly in blue overalls, to pound the car to bits and has posted the story and pictures on the Internet.

See the evidennce on MSN ( http://on-msn.com/gUQ0sS ) or on YourTube ( http://bit.ly/on-Utube)

The days when companies controlled their brand are over. But we are now in a new age, one where control of the brand is being wrested from the company by its customers.

How do you make sure this does not happen to your company or brand?

The best way to find out is to ask the customers. Not with simple attitude surveys - of which hundreds abound. These are valuable, but much more suited to evaluation of specific products or campaigns.

No, the real measure that affects the brand in the long term is the degree of engagement your company develops with your most valuable customers. Find those customers and ask the right question in a well structured way to determine the degree of Customer Engagement you have and you can then, from additional questions arising from the survey, build a better brand with stronger engagement. And you can measure the trends over time as you build the new future for your business.

That's how you can ensure your business does not get unpleasantly plastered virally over the Internet.


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Tony Lord is a director of TripleIC, specialists in the measurement of
Customer Engagement. He has been engaged in the science and practice of
Customer Engagement and on line surveys for almost ten years.
http://www.tripleic.com