Who owns your brand?

I’ve been skimming Christopher Carfi’s The Social Customer for a while but I love this, about the customer’s ownership of your brand.

The argument (roughly that customers own your brand, that on a socially networked planet, you cannot control their understanding of what your brand is and that you have no choice but to engage in a direct, multiple-levelled conversation with those pesky individuals you expect to GIVE YOU MONEY!) isn’t new but his expression of it is direct, devastatingly illustrated and distils the nuggets of wisdom you might normally find spread thinly across several books-worth of popular online marketing platitudes (you know the kind of book I mean) into a single gnarly post.

Here’s what Carfi has to say about fire-fighting:

“However, if there actually is an issue, address it, and state what is going to be done, and by when. For example:
1) Say what happened - State the case, tell what happened, explain what the situation was. Don’t spin, don’t make excuses. Just state the facts.
2) Say what you’re going to do about it – Inform customers about the short term fix. How are you going to put out the fire?
3) Plan for Murphy - Ok, the immediate crisis is over. What are you going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again
4) Report back - Let the customers know what’s going on. Was the short term fix applied? Are the long-term changes happening?”

Again, this isn’t new - most famously, Intel applied this very strategy back in the mid-nineties during the Pentium floating point debacle. Andy Grove spun it out into one of those books which illustrates how a) a PR disaster was turned around by a (then) unusual act of honesty on the part of a chip manufacturer and b) how the whole mess pushed Intel into the business of being a consumer brand - a service company. Grove calls those moments in a company’s life strategic inflexion points (see short portrait at Thinking Managers) (guilty confession - it’s one of the more over-used phrases in my vocabulary). Still, Intel was arguably in a position to have toughed it out if they wanted to. Now, that isn’t an option. Here are three recent demonstrations.

Exhibit 1: Sony’s digital protection balls-up -Sony put a disastrously inept DRM mechanism on CDs which installs programmes on the user’ computer, changes register entries and generally carries out all manner of unauthorised activity. Consumer outcry spreads like wildfire. Instant blogosphere rebuttal of every Sony excuse. Result: humiliating and total surrender from Sony. And all this before the PS3!

Exhibit 2: Digg takes down diggs of sites revealing the vulnerabilities of a new (yet again) DRM mechanism. Instant user riot. Digg overwhelmed with diggs of nothing but sites showing the hack, of pictures of t-shirt with the hack…Digg’s founders cave (and score a not inconsiderable PR triumph in the process, painting themselves as a kind of corporate David vs the Big Evil Goliath of Big Copyright).

Exhibit 3: Flickr and the Great Rebekka’s Photo controversy (here’s a good summary). Again, steps 1 to 3 followed to the letter, following an inept initial response. Jury’s still out on whether this will dent Flickr to any great extent, given the lack of real visibility on Step 4.

Finally, it struck me that this thought of Christopher’s:

It means creating social networks and online communities where customers can engage with your organization and each other. It means acting not as teflon-covered representatives of the organization, but instead engaging in natural exchanges as the human beings that we are.

has a number of applications. If, like me, one of your key tasks is struggling with internal corporate changes, it’s a good idea to remember that the people you’re dealing with are as equally your customers as anyone you’re trying to sell an ice cream (or a photo-sharing service) to. If I’m trying to implement change, if I’m trying to move people towards buy-in of a different vision of how things might be run, I’m in the branding business. And in that context, everything Christopher says applies to the business of change management.